The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (49 page)

“Decor,” said Ford, “pity about it.”

“Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe,” said Slartibartfast, “there is a reason.”

Ford glanced sharply around. He clearly thought this was taking an optimistic view of things.

The interior of the flight deck was dark green, dark red, dark brown, cramped and moodily lit. Inexplicably, the resemblance to a small Italian bistro had failed to end at the hatchway. Small pools of light picked out pot plants, glazed tiles and all sorts of little unidentifiable brass things.

Raffia-wrapped bottles lurked hideously in the shadows.

The instruments that had occupied Slartibartfast’s attention seemed to be mounted in the bottoms of bottles that were set in concrete.

Ford reached out and touched it.

Fake concrete. Plastic. Fake bottles set in fake concrete.

The fundamental heart of mind and Universe can take a running jump, he thought to himself, this is rubbish. On the other hand, it could not be denied that the way the ship had moved made the
Heart of Gold
seem like an electric pram.

He swung himself off the couch. He brushed himself off. He looked at Arthur, who was singing quietly to himself. He looked at the screen and recognized nothing. He looked at Slartibartfast.

“How far did we just travel?” he said.

“About …” said Slartibartfast, “about two-thirds of the way across the Galactic disc, I would say, roughly. Yes, roughly two-thirds, I think.”

“It’s a strange thing,” said Arthur quietly, “that the farther and faster one travels across the Universe, the more one’s position in it seems to be largely immaterial, and one is filled with a profound, or rather emptied of a …”

“Yes, very strange,” said Ford. “Where are we going?”

“We are going,” said Slartibartfast, “to confront an ancient nightmare of the Universe.”

“And where are you going to drop us off?”

“I will need your help.”

“Tough. Look, there’s somewhere you can take us where we can have fun, I’m trying to think of it; we can get drunk and maybe listen to some extremely evil music. Hold on, I’ll look it up.” He dug out his copy of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and zipped through those parts of the index primarily concerned with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

“A curse has arisen from the mists of time,” said Slartibartfast.

“Yes, I expect so,” said Ford. “Hey,” he said, lighting accidentally on one particular reference entry, “Eccentrica Gallumbits, did you ever meet her? The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. Some people say her
erogenous zones start some four miles from her actual body. Me, I disagree, I say five.”

“A curse,” said Slartibartfast, “which will engulf the Galaxy in fire and destruction, and possibly bring the Universe to a premature doom. I mean it,” he added.

“Sounds like a bad time,” said Ford; “with luck I’ll be drunk enough not to notice. Here,” he said, stabbing his finger at the screen of the
Guide
, “would be a really wicked place to go, and I think we should. What do you say, Arthur? Stop mumbling mantras and pay attention. There’s important stuff you’re missing here.”

Arthur pushed himself up from his couch and shook his head.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“To confront an ancient night—”

“Can it,” said Ford. “Arthur, we are going out into the Galaxy to have some fun. Is that an idea you can cope with?”

“What’s Slartibartfast looking so anxious about?” said Arthur.

“Nothing,” said Ford.

“Doom,” said Slartibartfast. “Come,” he added, with sudden authority, “there is much I must show and tell you.”

He walked toward a green wrought-iron spiral staircase set incomprehensibly in the middle of the flight deck and started to ascend. Arthur, with a frown, followed.

Ford slung the
Guide
sullenly back into his satchel.

“My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber,” he muttered to himself, “and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.”

Nevertheless, he stomped up the stairs behind them.

What they found upstairs was just stupid, or so it seemed, and Ford shook his head, buried his face in his hands and slumped against a pot plant, crushing it against the wall.

“The central computational area,” said Slartibartfast, unperturbed. “This is where every calculation affecting the ship in any way is performed. Yes, I know what it looks like, but it is in fact a complex four-dimensional topographical map of a series of highly complex mathematical functions.”

“It looks like a joke,” said Arthur.

“I know what it looks like,” said Slartibartfast, and went into it. As he did so, Arthur had a sudden vague flash of what it might mean, but he refused to believe it. The Universe could not possibly work like that, he thought, cannot possibly. That, he thought to himself, would be as absurd
as, as absurd as … he terminated that line of thinking. Most of the absurd things he could think of had already happened.

And this was one of them.

It was a large glass cage, or box—in fact a room.

In it was a table, a long one. Around it were gathered about a dozen chairs, of the bentwood style. On it was a tablecloth—a grubby, red-and-white checked tablecloth, scarred with the occasional cigarette burn, each, presumably, at a precisely calculated mathematical position.

And on the tablecloth sat some dozen half-eaten Italian meals, hedged about with half-eaten breadsticks and half-drunk glasses of wine, and toyed with listlessly by robots.

It was all completely artificial. The robot customers were attended by a robot waiter, a robot wine waiter and a robot maître d’. The furniture was artificial, the tablecloth artificial and each particular piece of food was clearly capable of exhibiting all the mechanical characteristics of, say, a
pollo sorpreso
, without actually being one.

And all participated in a little dance together—a complex routine involving the manipulation of menus, check pads, wallets, check books, credit cards, watches, pencils and paper napkins, which seemed to be hovering constantly on the edge of violence, but never actually getting anywhere.

Slartibartfast hurried in, and then appeared to pass the time of day quite idly with the maître d’, while one of the customer robots, an autorory, slid slowly under the table, mentioning what he intended to do to some guy over some girl.

Slartibartfast took over the seat that had been thus vacated and passed a shrewd eye over the menu. The tempo of the routine around the table seemed somehow imperceptibly to quicken. Arguments broke out, people attempted to prove things on napkins. They waved fiercely at each other, and attempted to examine each other’s pieces of chicken. The waiter’s hand began to move on the check pad more quickly than a human hand could manage, and then more quickly than a human eye could follow. The pace accelerated. Soon, an extraordinary and insistent politeness overwhelmed the group, and seconds later it seemed that a moment of consensus was suddenly achieved. A new vibration thrilled through the ship.

Slartibartfast emerged from the glass room.

“Bistromathics,” he said, “the most powerful computational force known to parascience. Come to the room of Informational Illusions.”

He swept past and carried them, bewildered, in his wake.

T
he Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors.

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.

The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.

The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic, equations used to engineer the Somebody Else’s Problem field.

The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon in this field.)

The baffling discrepancies that used to occur at this point remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously. They were at the time put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness, flashiness, tiredness, emotionality or the lateness of the hour, and completely forgotten about on the following morning. They were never tested under laboratory conditions, of course, because they never occurred in laboratories—not in reputable laboratories at least.

And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:

Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.

This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.

Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be understood. To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much like what the man in the street would have said “Oh, yes, I could have told you that.” Then some phrases like “Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks” were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it.

The small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street theater grant and went away.

I
n space travel, you see,” said Slartibartfast, as he fiddled with some instruments in the room of Informational Illusions, “in space travel …”

He stopped and looked about him.

The room of Informational Illusions was a welcome relief after the visual monstrosities of the central computational area. There was nothing in it. No information, no illusions, just themselves, white walls and a few small instruments that looked as if they were meant to plug into something that Slartibartfast couldn’t find.

“Yes?” urged Arthur. He had picked up Slartibartfast’s sense of urgency but didn’t know what to do with it.

“Yes what?” said the old man.

“You were saying?”

Slartibartfast looked at him sharply.

“The numbers,” he said, “are awful.” He resumed his search.

Arthur nodded wisely to himself. After a while he realized that this wasn’t getting him anywhere and decided that he would say “What?” after all.

“In space travel,” repeated Slartibartfast, “all the numbers are awful.”

Arthur nodded again and looked around to Ford for help, but Ford was practicing being sullen and getting quite good at it.

“I was only,” said Slartibartfast with a sigh, “trying to save you the trouble of asking me why all the ship’s computations were being done on a waiter’s check pad.”

Arthur frowned.

“Why,” he said, “were all the ship’s computations being done on a wait—”

He stopped.

Slartibartfast said, “Because in space travel all the numbers are awful.”

He could tell that he wasn’t getting his point across.

“Listen,” he said, “on a waiter’s check pad numbers dance. You must have encountered the phenomenon.”

“Well …”

“On a waiter’s check pad,” said Slartibartfast, “reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible, within certain parameters.”

“What parameters?”

“It’s impossible to say,” said Slartibartfast. “That’s one of them. Strange but true. At least, I think it’s strange,” he added, “and I am assured that it’s true.”

At that moment he located the slot in the wall for which he had been searching, and clicked the instrument he was holding into it.

“Do not be alarmed,” he said, and then suddenly darted an alarmed look at it himself, and lunged back, “it’s …”

They didn’t hear what he said, because at that moment the ship winked out of existence around them and a star battleship the size of a small Midlands industrial city plunged out of the sundered night toward them, star lasers ablaze.

A nightmare storm of blistering light seared through the blackness and smacked a fair bit off the planet directly behind them.

They gaped, pop-eyed, and were unable to scream.

A
nother world, another day, another dawn.

The early morning’s thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.