The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (55 page)

“Did you hear the news?” she said.

“Weeeeelaaaaah!” said Zipo Bibrok 5 × 10
⁸
, and you would have had to have been there to know exactly why he said this. None of this was on the tape of Informational Illusions and is all based on hearsay.

“No,” he added, when the thing that had made him say “Weeeeelaaaaah” had stopped happening. He moved his body around slightly to catch the first rays of the third and greatest of primeval Vod’s three suns that was creeping over the ludicrously beautiful horizon, and the sky now glittered with some of the greatest tanning power ever known.

A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach and drifted back to sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.

“I hope it isn’t good news,” muttered Zipo Bibrok 5 × l0
⁸
, “’cos I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Your Krikkit judgment was carried out today,” said the girl sumptuously. There was no need to say such a straightforward thing sumptuously, but she went ahead and did it anyway because it was that sort of day. “I heard it on the radio,” she said, “when I went back to the ship for the oil.”

“Uh-huh,” murmured Zipo and rested his head back on the jeweled sand.

“Something happened,” she said.

“Mmmm?”

“Just after the Slo-Time envelope was locked,” she said, and paused a moment from rubbing in the Essence of Qualactin, “a Krikkit warship that had been missing, presumed destroyed, turned out to be just missing after all. It appeared and tried to seize the Key.”

Zipo sat up sharply.

“Hey, what?” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said in a voice that would have calmed the Big Bang down, “apparently there was a short battle. The Key and the warship were disintegrated and blasted into the space-time continuum. Apparently they are lost forever.”

She smiled, and squeezed a little more Essence of Qualactin onto her fingertips. He relaxed and lay back down.

“Do what you did a moment or two ago,” he murmured.

“That?” she said.

“No, no,” he said, “that.”

She tried again.

“That?” she asked.

“Weeeeelaaaaaah!”

Again, you had to be there.

The fragrant breeze drifted up from the sea again.

A magician wandered along the beach, but no one needed him.

N
othing is lost forever,” said Slartibartfast, his face flickering redly in the light of the candle that the robot waiter was trying to take away, “except for the Cathedral of Chalesm.” “The what?” said Arthur with a start.

“The Cathedral of Chalesm,” repeated Slartibartfast. “It was during the course of my researches at the Campaign for Real Time that I …”

“The what?” said Arthur again.

The old man paused and gathered his thoughts, for what he hoped would be one last onslaught on this story. The robot waiter moved through the space-time matrices in a way that spectacularly combined the surly with the obsequious, made a snatch for the candle and got it. They had the check, had argued convincingly about who had the cannelloni and how many bottles of wine they had had, and, as Arthur had been dimly aware, had thereby successfully maneuvered the ship out of subjective space and into parking orbit round a strange planet. The waiter was now anxious to complete his part of the charade and clear the bistro.

“All will become clear,” said Slartibartfast.

“When?”

“In a minute. Listen. The time streams are now very polluted. There’s a lot of muck floating about in them, flotsam and jetsam, and more and more of it is now being regurgitated into the physical world. Eddies in the space-time continuum, you see.”

“So I hear,” said Arthur.

“Look, where are we going?” said Ford, pushing his chair back from the table with impatience, “because I’m eager to get there.”

“We are going,” said Slartibartfast, in a slow, measured voice, “to try to prevent the war robots of Krikkit from regaining the whole of the Key they need to unlock the planet of Krikkit from the Slo-Time envelope and release the rest of their army and their mad Masters.”

“It’s just,” said Ford, “that you mentioned a party.”

“I did,” said Slartibartfast, and hung his head.

He realized that it had been a mistake, because the idea seemed to exercise a strange and unhealthy fascination on the mind of Ford Prefect.

The more Slartibartfast unraveled the dark and tragic story of Krikkit and its people, the more Ford Prefect wanted to drink a lot and dance with girls.

The old man felt that he should not have mentioned the party until he absolutely had to. But there it was, the fact was out, and Ford Prefect had attached himself to it the way an Arcturan Megaleech attaches itself to its victim before biting his head off and making off with his spaceship.

“When,” said Ford eagerly, “do we get there?”

“When I’ve finished telling you why we have to go there.”

“I know why I’m going,” said Ford, and leaned back, sticking his hands behind his head. He did one of his smiles that made people twitch.

Slartibartfast had hoped for an easy retirement.

He had been planning to learn to play the octaventral heebiephone, a pleasantly futile task, he knew, because he had the wrong number of mouths.

He had also been planning to write an eccentric and relentlessly inaccurate monograph on the subject of equatorial fjords in order to set the record wrong about one or two matters he saw as important.

Instead, he had somehow got talked into doing some part-time work for the Campaign for Real Time and had started to take it all seriously for the first time in his life. As a result he now found himself spending his fast declining years combating evil and trying to save the Galaxy.

He found it exhausting work and sighed heavily.

“Listen,” he said, “at Camtim …”

“What?” said Arthur.

“The Campaign for Real Time, which I will tell you about later. I noticed that five pieces of jetsam that had in relatively recent times plopped back into existence seemed to correspond to the five pieces of the missing Key. Only two I could trace exactly—the Wooden Pillar, which appeared on your planet, and the Silver Bail. It seems to be at some sort of party. We must go there to retrieve it before the Krikkit robots find it, or who knows what may happen.”

“No,” said Ford firmly, “we must go to the party in order to drink a lot and dance with girls.”

“But haven’t you understood everything I …”

“Yes,” said Ford, with sudden and unexpected fierceness, “I’ve understood it all perfectly well. That’s why I want to have as many drinks and dance with as many girls as possible while there are still any left. If everything you’ve shown us is true …”

“True? Of course it’s true.”

“ … then we don’t stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova.”

“A what?” said Arthur sharply again. He had been following the conversation doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the thread now.

“A whelk’s chance in a supernova,” repeated Ford without losing momentum, “the …”

“What’s a whelk got to do with a supernova?” said Arthur.

“It doesn’t,” said Ford levelly, “stand a chance in one.”

He paused to see if the matter was now cleared up. The freshly puzzled looks clambering across Arthur’s face told him that it wasn’t.

“A supernova,” said Ford as quickly and as clearly as he could, “is a star that explodes at almost half the speed of light and burns with the brightness of a billion suns and then collapses as a superheavy neutron star. It’s a star that burns up other stars, got it? Nothing stands a chance in a supernova.”

“I see,” said Arthur.

“The …”

“So why a whelk particularly?”

“Why not a whelk? Doesn’t matter.”

Arthur accepted this, and Ford continued, picking up his early fierce momentum as best he could.

“The point is,” he said, “that people like you and me, Slartibartfast, and Arthur—particularly and especially Arthur—are just dilettantes, eccentrics, layabouts if you like.”

Slartibartfast frowned, partly in puzzlement and partly in umbrage. He started to speak.

“….” is as far as he got.

“We’re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford.

“…”

“And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.”

“I care about lots of things,” said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.

“Such as?”

“Well,” said the old man, “life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords.”

“Would you die for them?”

“Fjords?” blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. “No.”

“Well then.”

“Wouldn’t see the point, to be honest.”

“And I still can’t see the connection,” said Arthur, “with whelks.”

Ford could feel the conversation slipping out of his control, and refused to be sidetracked by anything at this point.

“The point is,” he hissed, “that we are not obsessive people, and we don’t stand a chance against …”

“Except for your sudden obsession with whelks,” pursued Arthur, “which I still haven’t understood.”

“Will you please leave whelks out of it?”

“I will if you will,” said Arthur. “You brought the subject up.”

“It was an error,” said Ford, “forget them. The point is this.”

He leaned forward and rested his forehead on the tips of his fingers.

“What was I talking about?” he said wearily.

“Let’s just go down to the party,” said Slartibartfast, “for whatever reason.” He stood up, shaking his head.

“I think that’s what I was trying to say,” said Ford.

For some unexplained reason, the teleport cubicles were in the bathroom.

T
ime travel is increasingly regarded as a menace. History is being polluted.

The
Encyclopedia Galactica
has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hyper-mathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk.

The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as well.

Here is an example. It may not seem to be an important one to some people, but to others it is crucial. It is certainly significant in that it was this single event that caused the Campaign for Real Time to be set up in the first place (or is it last? It depends which way round you see history as happening, and this, too, is now an increasingly vexed question).

There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as the finest poems in existence, the
Songs of the Long Land.

They are/were unspeakably wonderful. That is to say, you couldn’t speak very much of them at once without being so overcome with emotion, truth and a sense of the wholeness and oneness of things that you wouldn’t pretty soon need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda. They were that good.

Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.

Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of
them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer.

Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words to that effect.

They traveled the time waves; they found him. They explained the situation—with some difficulty—to him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write with such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do talk shows, on which he sparkled wittily.

He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a problem, but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition of his book and stacks of dried habra leaves to copy them out onto, making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way.

Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what’s changed? The first people say that that isn’t the point. They aren’t quite certain what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn’t it. They set up the Campaign for Real Time to try to stop this sort of thing going on. Their case was considerably strengthened by the fact that a week after they had set themselves up, news broke that not only had the great Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion refinery, but that the construction of the refinery had taken so long, and had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion production to start on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly became immensely valuable.

So a lot of history is now gone forever. The Campaigners for Real Time claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another, so time travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another. “The past,” they say, “is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.”