The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (31 page)

“Hi there, Mr. Beeblebrox, sir, sure is a great honor to …”

“Shut up and get us out of here, fast fast fast.”

“Sure thing, fella, where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere, doesn’t matter,” shouted Zaphod. “Yes it does!” he said again. “We want to go to the nearest place to eat!”

“Sure thing,” said the computer happily and a massive explosion rocked the bridge.

When Zarniwoop entered a minute or so later with a black eye, he regarded the four wisps of smoke with interest.

F
our inert bodies sank through spinning blackness. Consciousness had died, cold oblivion pulled the bodies down and down into the pit of unbeing. The roar of silence echoed dismally around them and they sank at last into a dark and bitter sea of heaving red that slowly engulfed them, seemingly forever.

After what seemed an eternity the sea receded and left them lying on a cold hard shore, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Cold spasms shook them, lights danced sickeningly around them. The cold hard shore tipped and spun and then stood still. It shone darkly—it was a very highly polished cold hard shore.

A green blur watched them disapprovingly.

It coughed.

“Good evening, madam, gentlemen,” it said. “Do you have a reservation?”

Ford Prefect’s consciousness snapped back like elastic, making his brain smart. He looked up woozily at the green blur.

“Reservation?” he said weakly.

“Yes, sir,” said the green blur.

“Do you need a reservation for the afterlife?”

In so far as it is possible for a green blur to arch its eyebrows disdainfully, this is what the green blur now did.

“Afterlife, sir?” it said.

Arthur Dent was grappling with his consciousness the way one grapples with a lost bar of soap in the bath.

“Is this the afterlife?” he stammered.

“Well, I assume so,” said Ford Prefect trying to work out which way was up. He tested the theory that it must lie in the opposite direction from the cold hard shore on which he was lying, and staggered to what he hoped were his feet.

“I mean,” he said, swaying gently, “there’s no way we could have survived that blast is there?”

“No,” muttered Arthur. He had raised himself on to his elbows but it
didn’t seem to improve things. He slumped down again.

“No,” said Trillian, standing up, “no way at all.”

A dull hoarse gurgling sound came from the floor. It was Zaphod Beeblebrox attempting to speak.

“I certainly didn’t survive,” he gurgled. “I was a total goner. Wham bang and that was it.”

“Yeah, thanks to you,” said Ford, “we didn’t stand a chance. We must have been blown to bits. Arms, legs everywhere.”

“Yeah,” said Zaphod struggling noisily to his feet.

“If the lady and gentlemen would care to order drinks …” said the green blur, hovering impatiently beside them.

“Kerpow, splat,” continued Zaphod, “instantaneously zonked into our component molecules. Hey, Ford,” he said, identifying one of the slowly solidifying blurs around him, “did you get that thing of your whole life flashing before you?”

“You got that too?” said Ford. “Your whole life?”

“Yeah,” said Zaphod, “at least I assume it was mine. I spend a lot of time out of my skulls you know.”

He looked around him at the various shapes that were at last becoming proper shapes instead of vague and wobbling shapeless shapes.

“So …” he said.

“So what?” said Ford.

“So here we are,” said Zaphod hesitantly, “lying dead …”

“Standing,” Trillian corrected him.

“Er, standing dead,” continued Zaphod, “in this desolate …”

“Restaurant,” said Arthur Dent who had got to his feet and could now, much to his surprise, see clearly. That is to say, the thing that surprised him was not that he could see, but what he could see.

“Here we are,” continued Zaphod doggedly, “standing dead in this desolate …”

“Five star,” said Trillian.

“Restaurant,” concluded Zaphod.

“Odd, isn’t it?” said Ford.

“Er, yeah.”

“Nice chandeliers though,” said Trillian.

They looked about themselves in bemusement.

“It’s not so much an afterlife,” said Arthur, “more a sort of
après vie.”

The chandeliers were in fact a little on the flashy side and the low vaulted ceiling from which they hung would not, in an ideal Universe, have
been painted in that particular shade of deep turquoise, and even if it had been it wouldn’t have been highlighted by concealed moodlighting. This is not, however, an ideal Universe, as was further evidenced by the eye-crossing patterns of the inlaid marble floor, and the way in which the fronting for the eighty-yard-long marble-topped bar had been made. The fronting for the eighty-yard-long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in.

A few smartly dressed creatures were lounging casually at the bar or relaxing in the richly colored body-hugging seats that were deployed here and there about the bar area. A young Vl’Hurg officer and his green steaming young lady passed through the large smoked glass doors at the far end of the bar into the dazzling light of the main body of the Restaurant beyond.

Behind Arthur was a large curtained bay window. He pulled aside the corner of the curtain and looked out at a bleak and dreary landscape, gray, pockmarked and dismal, a landscape which under normal circumstances would have given Arthur the creeping horrors. These were not, however, normal circumstances, for the thing that froze his blood and made his skin try to crawl up his back and off the top of his head was the sky. The sky was …

An attendant flunky politely drew the curtain back into place.

“All in good time, sir,” he said.

Zaphod’s eyes flashed.

“Hey, wait a minute, you dead guys,” he said. “I think we’re missing some ultraimportant thing here, you know. Something somebody said and we missed it.”

Arthur was profoundly relieved to turn his attention from what he had just seen.

He said, “I said it was a sort of
après …”

“Yeah, and don’t you wish you hadn’t?” said Zaphod. “Ford?”

“I said it was odd.”

“Yeah, shrewd but dull, perhaps it was—”

“Perhaps,” interrupted the green blur who had by this time resolved into the shape of a small wizened dark-suited green waiter, “perhaps you would care to discuss the matter over drinks.…”

“Drinks!” cried Zaphod. “That was it! See what you miss if you don’t stay alert.”

“Indeed, sir,” said the waiter patiently. “If the lady and gentlemen would care to take drinks before dinner …”

“Dinner!” Zaphod exclaimed with passion. “Listen, little green person, my stomach could take you home and cuddle you all night for the mere idea.”

“ … and the Universe,” continued the waiter, determined not to be deflected on his home stretch, “will explode later for your pleasure.”

Ford’s head swiveled slowly toward him. He spoke with feeling.

“Wow,” he said, “what sort of drinks do you serve in this place?”

The waiter laughed a polite little waiter’s laugh.

“Ah,” he said, “I think sir has perhaps misunderstood me.”

“Oh, I hope not,” breathed Ford.

The waiter coughed a polite little waiter’s cough.

“It is not unusual for our customers to be a little disorientated by the time journey,” he said, “so if I might suggest—”

“Time journey?” said Zaphod.

“Time journey?” said Ford.

“Time journey?” said Trillian.

“You mean this isn’t the afterlife?” said Arthur.

The waiter smiled a polite little waiter’s smile. He had almost exhausted his polite little waiter repertoire and would soon be slipping into his role of a rather tight-lipped and sarcastic little waiter.

“Afterlife, sir?” he said. “No, sir.”

“And we’re not dead?” said Arthur.

The waiter tightened his lips.

“Aha, ha,” he said. “Sir is most evidently alive, otherwise I would not attempt to serve sir.”

In an extraordinary gesture which it is pointless attempting to describe, Zaphod Beeblebrox slapped both his foreheads with two of his arms and one of his thighs with the other.

“Hey, guys,” he said, “this is crazy. We did it. We finally got to where we were going. This is Milliways!”

“Milliways!” said Ford.

“Yes, sir,” said the waiter, laying on the patience with a trowel, “this is Milliways—the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.”

“End of what?” said Arthur.

“The Universe,” repeated the waiter, very clearly and unnecessarily distinctly.

“When did that end?” said Arthur.

“In just a few minutes, sir,” said the waiter. He took a deep breath. He didn’t need to do this since his body was supplied with the peculiar assortment of gases it required for survival from a small intravenous device strapped to his leg. There are times, however, when whatever your metabolism you have to take a deep breath.

“Now, if you would care to order your drinks at last,” he said, “I will then show you to your table.”

Zaphod grinned two manic grins, sauntered over to the bar and bought most of it.

T
he Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It has been built on the fragmented remains of … it
will
be built on the fragmented … that is to say it will have been built by this time, and indeed has been—

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s
Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations
. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

To resume:

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering.

It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.

This is, many would say, impossible.

In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptuous meals while watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them.

This, many would say, is equally impossible.

You can arrive (mayan arrivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome).

This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible.

At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with dinan on when) a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.

This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.

You can visit it as many times as you like (mayan on-visit reonvisiting … and so on—for further tense correction consult Dr. Street-mentioner’s book) and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes.

This, even if the rest were true, which it isn’t, is patently impossible, say the doubters.

All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.

This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane, which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan: “If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”

A
t the bar, Zaphod was rapidly becoming as tired as a newt. His heads knocked together and his smiles were coming out of sync. He was miserably happy.

“Zaphod,” said Ford, “while you’re still capable of speech, would you care to tell me what the photon happened? Where have you been? Where have we been? Small matter, but I’d like it cleared up.”

Zaphod’s left head sobered up, leaving his right to sink further into the obscurity of drink.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve been around. They want me to find the man who rules the Universe, but I don’t care to meet him. I believe the man can’t cook.”

His left head watched his right head saying this and then nodded.

“True,” it said, “have another drink.”

Ford had another Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the drink which has been described as the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging—expensive and bad for the head. Whatever had happened, Ford decided, he didn’t really care too much.