The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (28 page)

Finally he saw it.

He picked up five small plastic squares and laid them on the board that lay just in front of the rack.

The five squares had on them the five letters
E
,
X
,
Q
,
U
, and
I
. He laid them next to the letters
S
,
I
,
T
,
E
.

“Exquisite,” he said, “on a triple word score. Scores rather a lot I’m afraid.”

The ship bumped and scattered some of the letters for the nth time.

Trillian sighed and started to sort them out again.

Up and down the silent corridors echoed Ford Prefect’s feet as he stalked the ship thumping dead instruments.

Why did the ship keep shaking? he thought.

Why did it rock and sway?

Why could he not find out where they were?

Where, basically, were they?

The left-hand tower of the
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
offices streaked through interstellar space at a speed never equaled either before or since by any other office block in the Universe.

In a room halfway up it, Zaphod Beeblebrox strode angrily.

Roosta sat on the edge of the desk doing some routine towel maintenance.

“Hey, where did you say this building was flying to?” demanded Zaphod.

“The Frogstar,” said Roosta, “the most totally evil place in the Universe.”

“Do they have food there?” said Zaphod.

“Food? You’re going to the Frogstar and you’re worried about whether they’ve got food?”

“Without food I may not make it to the Frogstar.”

Out of the window, they could see nothing but the flickering light of the force beams, and vague green streaks which were presumably the distorted shapes of the Frogstar Fighters. At this speed, space itself was invisible, and indeed unreal.

“Here, suck this,” said Roosta, offering Zaphod his towel.

Zaphod stared at him as if he expected a cuckoo to leap out of his forehead on a small spring.

“It’s soaked in nutrients,” explained Roosta.

“What are you, a messy eater or something?” said Zaphod.

“The yellow stripes are high in protein, the green ones have vitamin B and C complexes, the little pink flowers contain wheatgerm extract.”

Zaphod took and looked at it in amazement.

“What are the brown stains?” he asked.

“Bar-B-Q sauce,” said Roosta, “for when I get sick of wheatgerm.”

Zaphod sniffed it doubtfully.

Even more doubtfully, he sucked a corner. He spat it out again.

“Ugh,” he stated.

“Yes,” said Roosta, “when I’ve had to suck that end I usually need to suck the other end a bit too.”

“Why,” asked Zaphod suspiciously, “what’s in that?”

“Antidepressants,” said Roosta.

“I’ve gone right off this towel, you know,” said Zaphod handing it back.

Roosta took it back from him, swung himself off the desk, walked around it, sat in the chair and put his feet up.

“Beeblebrox,” he said, sticking his hands behind his head, “have you any idea what’s going to happen to you on the Frogstar?”

“They’re going to feed me?” hazarded Zaphod hopefully.

“They’re going to feed you,” said Roosta, “into the Total Perspective Vortex!”

Zaphod had never heard of this. He believed that he had heard of all the fun things in the Galaxy, so he assumed that the Total Perspective Vortex was not fun. He asked Roosta what it was.

“Only,” said Roosta, “the most savage psychic torture a sentient being can undergo.”

Zaphod nodded a resigned nod.

“So,” he said, “no food, huh?”

“Listen!” said Roosta urgently. “You can kill a man, destroy his body, break his spirit, but only the Total Perspective Vortex can annihilate a man’s soul! The treatment lasts seconds, but the effects last the rest of your life!”

“You ever had a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster?” asked Zaphod sharply.

“This is worse.”

“Phreeow!” admitted Zaphod, much impressed.

“Any idea why these guys might want to do this to me?” he added a moment later.

“They believe it will be the best way of destroying you forever. They know what you’re after.”

“Could they drop me a note and let me know as well?”

“You know,” said Roosta, “you know, Beeblebrox. You want to meet the man who rules the Universe.”

“Can he cook?” said Zaphod. On reflection he added:

“I doubt if he can. If he could cook a good meal he wouldn’t worry about the rest of the Universe. I want to meet a cook.”

Roosta sighed heavily.

“What are you doing here anyway?” demanded Zaphod, “what’s all this got to do with you?”

“I’m just one of those who planned this thing, along with Zarniwoop, along with Yooden Vranx, along with your great-grandfather, along with you, Beeblebrox.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. I was told you had changed, I didn’t realize how much.”
“But …”

“I am here to do one job. I will do it before I leave you.”

“What job, man? What are you talking about?”

“I will do it before I leave you.”

Roosta lapsed into an impenetrable silence.

Zaphod was terribly glad.

T
he air around the second planet of the Frogstar system was stale and unwholesome.

The dank winds that swept continually over its surface swept over salt flats, dried up marshland, tangled and rotting vegetation and the crumbling remains of ruined cities. No life moved across its surface. The ground, like that of many planets in this part of the Galaxy, had long been deserted.

The howl of the wind was desolate enough as it gusted through the old decaying houses of the cities; it was more desolate as it whipped about the bottoms of the tall black towers that swayed uneasily here and there about the surface of this world. At the top of these towers lived colonies of large, scraggy, evil-smelling birds, the sole survivors of the civilization that once lived here.

The howl of the wind was at its most desolate, however, when it passed over a pimple of a place set in the middle of a wide gray plain on the outskirts of the largest of the abandoned cities.

This pimple of a place was the thing that had earned this world the reputation of being the most totally evil place in the Galaxy. From without it was simply a steel dome about thirty feet across. From within it was something more monstrous than the mind can comprehend.

About a hundred yards or so away, and separated from it by a pockmarked and blasted stretch of the most barren land imaginable was what would probably have to be described as a landing pad of sorts. That is to say that scattered over a largish area were the ungainly hulks of two or three dozen crash-landed buildings.

Flitting over and around these buildings was a mind, a mind that was waiting for something.

The mind directed its attention into the air, and before very long a distant speck appeared, surrounded by a ring of smaller specks.

The larger speck was the left-hand tower of the
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
office building, descending through the stratosphere of Frogstar World B.

As it descended, Roosta suddenly broke the long uncomfortable silence that had grown up between the two men.

He stood up and gathered his towel into a bag. He said:

“Beeblebrox, I will now do the job I was sent here to do.”

Zaphod looked up at him from where he was sitting in a corner sharing unspoken thoughts with Marvin.

“Yeah?” he said.

“The building will shortly be landing. When you leave the building, do not go out of the door,” said Roosta, “go out of the window.”

“Good luck,” he added, and walked out of the door, disappearing from Zaphod’s life as mysteriously as he had entered it.

Zaphod leaped up and tried the door, but Roosta had already locked it. He shrugged and returned to the corner.

Two minutes later, the building crash-landed amongst the other wreckage. Its escort of Frogstar Fighters deactivated their force beams and soared off into the air again, bound for Frogstar World A, an altogether more congenial spot. They never landed on Frogstar World B. No one did. No one ever walked on its surface other than the intended victims of the Total Perspective Vortex.

Zaphod was badly shaken by the crash. He lay for a while in the silent dusty rubble to which most of the room had been reduced. He felt that he was at the lowest ebb he had ever reached in his life. He felt bewildered, he felt lonely, he felt unloved. Eventually he felt he ought to get whatever it was over with.

He looked around the cracked and broken room. The wall had split round the door frame, and the door hung open. The window, by some miracle, was closed and unbroken. For a while he hesitated, then he thought that if his strange and recent companion had been through all that he had been through just to tell him what he had told him, then there must be a good reason for it. With Marvin’s help he got the window open. Outside it, the cloud of dust aroused by the crash, and the hulks of the other buildings with which this one was surrounded, effectively prevented Zaphod from seeing anything of the world outside.

Not that this concerned him unduly. His main concern was what he saw when he looked down. Zarniwoop’s office was on the fifteenth floor. The building had landed at a tilt of about forty-five degrees, but still the descent looked heart-stopping.

Eventually, stung by the continuous series of contemptuous looks that Marvin appeared to be giving him, he took a deep breath and clambered
out on to the steeply inclined side of the building. Marvin followed him, and together they began to crawl slowly and painfully down the fifteen floors that separated them from the ground.

As he crawled, the dank air and dust choked his lungs, his eyes smarted and the terrific distance down made his heads spin.

The occasional remark from Marvin of the order of “This is the sort of thing you life forms enjoy, is it? I ask merely for information,” did little to improve his state of mind.

About halfway down the side of the shattered building they stopped to rest. It seemed to Zaphod as he lay there panting with fear and exhaustion that Marvin seemed a mite more cheerful than usual. Eventually he realized this wasn’t so. The robot just seemed cheerful in comparison with his own mood.

A large, scraggy black bird came flapping through the slowly settling clouds of dust and, stretching down its scrawny legs, landed on an inclined window ledge a couple of yards from Zaphod. It folded its ungainly wings and teetered awkwardly on its perch.

Its wingspan must have been something like six feet, and its head and neck seemed curiously large for a bird. Its face was flat, the beak underdeveloped, and halfway along the underside of its wings the vestiges of something handlike could be clearly seen.

In fact, it looked almost human.

It turned its heavy eyes on Zaphod and clicked its beak in a desultory fashion.

“Go away,” said Zaphod.

“Okay,” muttered the bird morosely and flapped off into the dust again.

Zaphod watched its departure in bewilderment.

“Did that bird just talk to me?” he asked Marvin nervously. He was quite prepared to believe the alternative explanation, that he was in fact hallucinating.

“Yes,” confirmed Marvin.

“Poor souls,” said a deep, ethereal voice in Zaphod’s ear.

Twisting around violently to find the source of the voice nearly caused Zaphod to fall off the building. He grabbed savagely at a protruding window fitting and cut his hand on it. He hung on, breathing heavily.

The voice had no visible source whatsoever—there was no one there. Nevertheless, it spoke again.

“A tragic history behind them, you know. A terrible blight.”

Zaphod looked wildly about. The voice was deep and quiet. In other
circumstances it would even be described as soothing. There is, however, nothing soothing about being addressed by a disembodied voice out of nowhere, particularly when you are, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, not at your best and hanging from a ledge eight stories up a crashed building.

“Hey, er …” he stammered.

“Shall I tell you their story?” inquired the voice quietly.

“Hey, who are you?” panted Zaphod. “Where are you?”

“Later then, perhaps,” murmured the voice. “I am Gargravarr. I am the Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex.”

“Why can’t I see …?”

“You will find your progress down the building greatly facilitated,” the voice lifted, “if you move about two yards to your left. Why don’t you try it?”

Zaphod looked and saw a series of short horizontal grooves leading all the way down the side of the building. Gratefully he shifted himself across to them.

“Why don’t I see you again at the bottom?” said the voice in his ear, and as it spoke it faded.

“Hey,” called out Zaphod, “where are you …?”

“It’ll only take you a couple of minutes …” said the voice very faintly.

“Marvin,” said Zaphod earnestly to the robot squatting dejectedly next to him, “did a … did a voice just …?”

“Yes,” Marvin replied tersely.

Zaphod nodded. He took out his Peril Sensitive Sunglasses again. They were completely black, and by now quite badly scratched by the unexpected metal object in his pocket. He put them on. He would find his way down the building more comfortably if he didn’t actually have to look at what he was doing.

Minutes later he clambered over the ripped and mangled foundations of the building and, once more removing his sunglasses, he dropped to the ground.

Marvin joined him a moment or so later and lay face down in the dust and rubble, from which position he seemed disinclined to move.

“Ah, there you are,” said the voice suddenly in Zaphod’s ear. “Excuse me leaving you like that; it’s just that I have a terrible head for heights. At least,” it added wistfully, “I did have a terrible head for heights.”

Zaphod looked around slowly and carefully, just to see if he had missed something which might be the source of the voice. All he saw, however, was the dust, the rubble and the towering hulks of the encircling buildings.