The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (60 page)

“So invigorating,” said the little man, panting and wiping tears from his eyes, “what an exciting life you must lead. Thank you very much.”

He shook Arthur warmly by the hand and walked off into the crowd. Arthur shook his head in astonishment.

A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type with a hook mouth, a lantern nose and small beady little cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers, a black silk shirt open to what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learned never to make assumptions about the anatomies of the sort of people he tended to meet these days, and had all sorts of nasty dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He carried something in a black bag, and clearly wanted people to notice that he didn’t want them to notice it.

“Hey, er, did I hear you say your name just now?” he said.

This was one of the many things that Arthur had told the enthusiastic little man.

“Yes, it’s Arthur Dent.”

The man seemed to be dancing slightly to some rhythm other than any of the several that the band was grimly pushing out.

“Yeah,” he said, “only there was a man in a mountain wanted to see you.”

“I met him.”

“Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know.”

“Yes, I met him.”

“Yeah, well, I think you should know that.”

“I do. I met him.”

The man paused to chew a little gum. Then he clapped Arthur on the back.

“Okay,” he said, “all right. I’m just telling you, right? Good night, good luck, win awards.”

“What?” said Arthur, who was beginning to flounder seriously at this point.

“Whatever. Do what you do. Do it well.” He made a sort of clucking noise with whatever he was chewing and then some vaguely dynamic gesture.

“Why?” said Arthur.

“Do it badly,” said the man. “Who cares? Who gives a swut?” The blood suddenly seemed to pump angrily into the man’s face and he started to shout.

“Why not go mad?” he said. “Go away, get off my back, will you, guy? Just zark off.!!”

“It’s been real.” The man gave a sharp wave and disappeared off into the throng.

“What was that all about?” asked Arthur to a girl he found standing beside him. “Why did he tell me to win awards?”

“Just show biz talk,” answered the girl. “He just won an award at the Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards ceremony, and he was hoping to be able to pass it off lightly, only you didn’t mention it so he couldn’t.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “oh, well, I’m sorry I didn’t. What was it for?”

“The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word ‘Belgium’ in a Serious Screenplay. It’s very prestigious.”

“The most gratuitous use of which word?” asked Arthur, with a determined attempt to keep his brain in neutral.

“Belgium,” said the girl, “I hardly like to say it.”

“Belgium?” exclaimed Arthur.

A drunken seven-toed sloth staggered past, gawked at the word and threw itself backward at a blurry-eyed pterodactyl, roaring with displeasure.

“Are we talking,” said Arthur, “about the very flat country, with all the EEC and the fog?”

“What?” said the girl.

“Belgium,” said Arthur.

“Raaaaaarrrchchchchch!” screeched the pterodactyl.

“Grrruuuuuurrrghhhh,” agreed the seven-toed sloth.

“They must be thinking of Ostend Hoverport,” muttered Arthur. He turned back to the girl.

“Have you ever been to Belgium in fact?” he asked brightly and she nearly hit him.

“I think,” she said, restraining herself, “that you should restrict that sort of remark to something artistic.”

“You sound as if I just said something unspeakably rude.”

“You did.”

In today’s modern Galaxy there is of course very little still held to be unspeakable. Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.

So, for instance, when in a recent national speech the Financial Minister of the Royal World Estate of Quarlvista actually dared to say that due to one thing and another and the fact that no one had made any food for a while and the king seemed to have died and most of the population had been on holiday now for over three years, the economy was now in what he called “one whole joojooflop situation,” everyone was so pleased that he felt able to come out and say it that they quite failed to note that their entire five-thousand-year-old civilization had just collapsed overnight.

But even though words like “joojooflop,” “swut,” and “turlingdrome” are now perfectly acceptable in common usage there is one word that is still beyond the pale. The concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the Galaxy except for use in Serious Screenplays. There is also, or
was
, one planet where they didn’t know what it meant, the stupid turlingdromes.

“I see,” said Arthur, who didn’t, “so what do you get for using the name of a perfectly innocent if slightly dull European country gratuitously in a Serious Screenplay?”

“A Rory,” said the girl, “it’s just a small silver thing set on a large black base. What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything, I was just about to ask what the silver …”

“Oh, I thought you said ‘whop.’“

“Said what?”

“Whop.”

P
eople had been dropping in on the party now for some years, fashionable gate-crashers from other worlds, and for some time it had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked out at their own world beneath them, with its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards, its vast tracts of new desert, its seas full of cracker crumbs and worse, that their world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they could manage to stay sober for long enough to make the entire party spaceworthy and maybe take it off to some other people’s worlds where the air might be fresher and give them fewer headaches.

The few undernourished farmers who still managed to scratch out a feeble existence on the half-dead ground of the planet’s surface would have been extremely pleased to hear this, but that day, as the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked up in haggard fear of yet another cheese and wine raid, it became clear that the party was not going anywhere else for a while, that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be time to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was, what time of year it was and whether in any of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi going anywhere.

The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a strange white spaceship that seemed to be half sticking through it. Together they were lurching, heaving and spinning their way around the sky in grotesque disregard of their own weight.

The clouds parted. The air roared and leaped out of their way.

The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, while the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn’t feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and certainly not while it, the second duck, was busy flying.

The sky sang and screamed with the rage of it all and buffeted the ground with shock waves.

And suddenly, with a foop, the Krikkit ship was gone.

The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man leaning against an unexpectedly open door. It spun and wobbled on its Hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead. It staggered back across the sky again.

For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly they could not continue for long. The party was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional broken-backed pirouette could not disguise.

The longer, at this point, that it avoided the ground, the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.

Inside things were not going well either. They were going monstrously badly in fact and people were hating it and saying so loudly. The Krikkit robots had been.

They had removed the award for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word “Belgium” in a Serious Screenplay, and in its place had left a scene of devastation that left Arthur feeling almost as sick as a runner-up for a Rory.

“We would love to stay and help,” shouted Ford, picking his way over the mangled debris, “only we’re not going to.”

The party lurched again, provoking feverish cries and groans from among the smoking wreckage.

“We have to go and save the Universe, you see,” said Ford, “and if that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right. Either way we’re off.”

He suddenly came across an unopened bottle lying, miraculously unbroken, on the ground.

“Do you mind if we take this?” he said. “You won’t be needing it.”

He took a packet of potato chips, too.

“Trillian?” shouted Arthur in a shocked and weakened voice. In the smoking mess he could see nothing.

“Earthman, we must go,” said Slartibartfast nervously.

“Trillian?” shouted Arthur again.

A moment or two later, Trillian staggered, shaking, into view, supported by her new friend the Thunder God.

“The girl stays with me,” said Thor. “There’s a great party going on in Valhalla, we’ll by flying off.…”

“Where were you when all this was going on?” said Arthur.

“Upstairs,” said Thor. “I was weighing her. Flyings a tricky business, you see, you have to calculate wind.…”

“She comes with us,” said Arthur.

“Hey,” said Trillian, “don’t I …”

“No,” said Arthur, “you come with us.”

Thor looked at him with slowly smoldering eyes. He was making some point about godliness and it had nothing to do with being clean.

“She comes with me,” he said quietly.

“Come on, Earthman,” said Slartibartfast nervously, picking at Arthur’s sleeve.

“Come on, Slartibartfast,” said Ford nervously, picking at the old man’s sleeve. Slartibartfast had the teleport device.

The party lurched and swayed, sending everyone reeling, except for Thor and except for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the Thunder God’s black eyes.

Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what now appeared to be his tiny little fists.

“Want to make something of it?” he said.

“I beg your minuscule pardon?” roared Thor.

“I said,” repeated Arthur, and he could not keep the quavering out of his voice, “do you want to make something of it?” He waggled his fists ridiculously.

Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of smoke curled upward from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in it, too.

He gripped his belt.

He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.

He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it up in his hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up a possible misunderstanding that he might merely have been carrying a telegraph pole around with him.

“Do I want,” he said, with a hiss like a river flowing through a steel mill, “to make something of it?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, his voice suddenly and extraordinarily strong and belligerent. He waggled his fists, again, this time as if he meant it.

“You want to step outside?” he snarled at Thor.

“All right!” bellowed Thor, like an enraged bull (or in fact like an enraged Thunder God, which is a great deal more impressive), and did so.

“Good,” said Arthur, “that’s got rid of him. Slarty, get us out of here.”

A
ll right,” shouted Ford at Arthur, “so I’m a coward, the point is I’m still alive.” They were back aboard the starship
Bistromath
, So was Slartibartfast. So was Trillian. Harmony and concord were not.

“Well, so am I alive, aren’t I?” retaliated Arthur, haggard with adventure and anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if they wanted to punch each other.

“You damn nearly weren’t,” exploded Ford.

Arthur turned sharply to Slartibartfast, who was sitting in his pilot couch on the flight deck gazing thoughtfully into the bottom of a bottle that was telling him something he clearly couldn’t fathom. He appealed to him.

“Do you think he understands the first word I’ve been saying?” he said, quivering with emotion.

“I don’t know,” replied Slartibartfast, a little abstractedly. “I’m not sure,” he added, glancing up very briefly, “that I do.” He stared at his instruments with renewed vigor and bafflement. “You’ll have to explain it to us again,” he said.

“Well …”

“But later. Terrible things are afoot.”

He tapped the pseudoglass of the bottle bottom.

“We fared rather pathetically at the party, I’m afraid,” he said, “and our only hope now is to try to prevent the robots from using the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that I don’t know,” he muttered, “just have to go there, I suppose. Can’t say I like the idea at all. Probably end up dead.”

“Where is Trillian anyway?” said Arthur with a sudden affectation of unconcern. What he had been angry about was that Ford had berated him for wasting time over all the business with the Thunder God when they could have been making a rather more rapid escape. Arthur’s own opinion, and he had offered it for whatever anybody might have felt it was worth, was that he had been extraordinarily brave and resourceful.

The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys. What really hurt, though, was that Trillian didn’t
seem to react much one way or the other and had wandered off somewhere.

“And where are my potato chips?” said Ford.