The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (83 page)

“Arthur, who is this?” said Fenchurch.

“Ford Prefect,” said Arthur. “I may have mentioned him in passing.”

I
f or a total of three days and nights the giant silver robot stood in stunned amazement straddling the remains of Knightsbridge, swaying slightly and trying to work out a number of things. Government deputations came to see it, ranting journalists by the truckload asked each other questions on the air about what they thought of it all, flights of fighter bombers tried pathetically to attack it—but no lizards appeared. It scanned the horizon slowly.

At night it was at its most spectacular, floodlit by the teams of television crews who covered it continuously as it continuously did nothing.

It thought and thought and eventually reached a conclusion.

It would have to send out its service robots.

It should have thought of that before, but it was having a number of problems.

The tiny flying robots came screeching out of the hatchway one afternoon in a terrifying cloud of metal. They roamed the surrounding terrain, frantically attacking some things and defending others.

One of them at last found a pet shop with some lizards, but it instantly defended the pet shop for democracy so savagely that little in the area survived.

A turning point came when a crack team of flying screechers discovered the zoo in Regent’s Park, and most particularly the reptile house.

Learning a little caution from their previous mistakes in the pet shop, the flying drills and fretsaws brought some of the larger and fatter iguanas to the giant silver robot, who tried to conduct high-level talks with them.

Eventually the robot announced to the world that despite the full, frank, and wide-ranging exchange of views, the high-level talks had broken down, the lizards had been retired, and that it, the robot, would take a short holiday somewhere and for some reason selected Bournemouth.

Ford Prefect, watching it on TV, nodded, laughed, and had another beer. Immediate preparations were made for its departure.

The flying toolkits screeched and sawed and drilled and fried things with light throughout the day and all through the nighttime, and in the morning, stunningly, a giant mobile gantry started to roll westward on
several roads simultaneously with the robot standing on it, supported within the gantry.

Westward it crawled, like a strange carnival buzzed around by its servants and helicopters and news coaches, scything through the land until at last it came to Bournemouth, where the robot slowly freed itself of its transport system’s embraces and went and lay for ten days on the beach.

It was, of course, by far the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Bournemouth.

Crowds gathered daily along the perimeter which was staked out and guarded as the robot’s recreation area, and tried to see what it was doing.

Motorboats prowled up and down the shore to see what it was doing.

It was doing nothing. It was lying on the beach. It was lying a little awkwardly on its face.

It was a journalist from a local paper who, late one night, managed to do what no one else in the world so far had managed, which was to strike up a brief intelligible conversation with one of the service robots guarding the perimeter.

It was an extraordinary breakthrough.

“I think there’s a story in it,” confided the journalist over a cigarette shared through the steel-link fence, “but it needs a good local angle. I’ve got a little list of questions here,” he went on, rummaging awkwardly in an inner pocket. “Perhaps you could get him, it, whatever you call him, to run through them quickly.”

The little flying ratchet screwdriver said it would see what it could do and screeched off.

A reply was never forthcoming.

Curiously, however, the questions on the piece of paper more or less exactly matched the questions that were going through the massive battle-scarred industrial-quality circuits of the robot’s mind. They were these:

“How do you feel about being a robot?”

“How does it feel to be from outer space?” and,

“How do you like Bournemouth?”

Early the following day things started to be packed up and within a few days it became apparent that the robot was preparing to leave for good.

“The point is,” said Fenchurch to Ford, “can you get us on board?”

Ford looked wildly at his watch.

“I have some serious unfinished business to attend to,” he exclaimed.

C
rowds thronged as close as they could to the giant silver craft. The immediate perimeter was fenced off and patrolled by the tiny flying service robots. Staked out around that was the army, which had been completely unable to breach that inner perimeter, but were damned if anybody was going to breach them. They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though whether they were there to protect the public from the army or the army from the public, or to guarantee the giant ship’s diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting parking tickets was entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.

The inner perimeter fence was now being dismantled. The army stirred uncomfortably, uncertain of how to react to the fact that the reason for their being there seemed as if it were simply going to get up and go.

The giant robot had lurched back aboard the ship at lunchtime, and now it was five o’clock in the afternoon and no further sign had been seen of it. Much had been heard—more grindings and rumblings from deep within the craft, the music of a million hideous malfunctions; but the sense of tense expectation among the crowd was born of the fact that they tensely expected to be disappointed. This wonderful extraordinary thing had come into their lives, and now it was simply going to go without them.

Two people were particularly aware of this sensation. Arthur and Fenchurch scanned the crowd anxiously, unable to find Ford Prefect in it anywhere, or any sign that he had the slightest intention of being there.

“How reliable is he?” asked Fenchurch in a sinking voice.

“How
reliable?”
asked Arthur. He gave a hollow laugh. “How shallow is the ocean?” he asked. “How cold is the sun?”

The last parts of the robot’s gantry transport were being carried on board, and the few remaining sections of the perimeter fence were now stacked at the bottom of the ramp waiting to follow them. The soldiers on guard round the ramp bristled meaningfully, orders were barked back and forth, hurried conferences were held, but nothing, of course, could be done about any of it.

Hopelessly, and with no clear plan now, Arthur and Fenchurch pushed
forward through the crowd, but since the whole crowd was also trying to push forward through the crowd, this got them nowhere.

And within a few minutes, nothing remained outside the ship; every last link of the fence was aboard. A couple of flying fretsaws and a spirit level seemed to do one last check around the site and then screamed in through the giant hatchway themselves.

A few seconds passed.

The sounds of mechanical disarray from within changed in intensity, and slowly, heavily, the huge steel ramp began to lift itself back out of the Harrods Food Halls. The sound that accompanied it was the sound of thousands of tense, excited people being completely ignored.

“Hold it!”

A megaphone barked from a taxi that screeched to a halt on the edge of the milling crowd.

“There has been,” barked the megaphone, “a major scientific break-in! Through. Breakthrough,” it corrected itself. The door flew open and a small man from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse leapt out wearing a white coat.

“Hold it!” he shouted again, and this time brandished a short squat black rod with lights on it. The lights winked briefly, the ramp paused in its ascent, and then in obedience to the signals from the Thumb (which half the electronic engineers in the Galaxy are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming, while the other half are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming the jamming signals), slowly ground its way downward again.

Ford Prefect grabbed his megaphone from out of the taxi and started bawling at the crowd through it.

“Make way,” he shouted, “make way, please, this is a major scientific breakthrough! You and you, get the equipment from the taxi.”

Completely at random he pointed at Arthur and Fenchurch, who wrestled their way back out of the crowd and clustered urgently round the taxi.

“All right, I want you to clear a passage, please, for some important pieces of scientific equipment,” boomed Ford. “Just everybody keep calm. It’s all under control, there’s nothing to see. It is merely a major scientific breakthrough. Keep calm now. Important scientific equipment. Clear the way.”

Hungry for new excitement, delighted at this sudden reprieve from disappointment, the crowd enthusiastically fell back and started to open up.

Arthur was a little surprised to see what was printed on the boxes of important scientific equipment in the back of the taxi.

“Hang your coat over them,” he muttered to Fenchurch as he heaved them out to her. Hurriedly, he maneuvered out the large supermarket cart that was also jammed against the back seat. It clattered to the ground, and together they loaded the boxes into it.

“Clear a path, please,” shouted Ford again. “Everything’s under proper scientific control.”

“He said you’d pay,” said the taxi driver to Arthur, who dug out some notes and paid him. There was the distant sound of police sirens.

“Move along there,” shouted Ford, “and no one will get hurt.”

The crowd, surged and closed behind them again, as frantically they pushed and hauled the rattling supermarket cart through the rubble toward the ramp.

“It’s all right,” Ford continued to bellow. “There’s nothing to see, it’s all over. None of this is actually happening.”

“Clear the way, please,” boomed a police megaphone from the back of the crowd. “There’s been a break-in, clear the way.”

“Breakthrough,” yelled Ford in competition. “A scientific breakthrough.”

“This is the police! Clear the way!”

“Scientific equipment! Clear the way!”

“Police! Let us through!”

“Walkmen!” yelled Ford, and pulled half a dozen miniature tape players from his pockets and tossed them into the crowd. The resulting seconds of utter confusion allowed them to get the supermarket cart to the edge of the ramp, and to haul it up onto the lip of it.

“Hold tight,” muttered Ford, and released a button on his Electronic Thumb. Beneath them, the huge ramp shuddered and began slowly to heave its way upward.

“OK, kids,” he said as the milling crowd dropped away beneath them and they started to lurch their way along the tilting ramp into the bowels of the ship, “looks like we’re on our way.”

A
rthur Dent was irritated to be continually wakened by the sound of gunfire.

Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was still managing to sleep fitfully, he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway that they had fashioned into a kind of bunk for themselves, slung himself down the access ladder, and prowled the corridors moodily.

They were claustrophobic and ill-lit. The lighting circuits buzzed annoyingly.

That wasn’t it, though.

He paused and leaned backward as a flying power drill flew past him down the dim corridor with a screech, occasionally clanging against the walls like a confused bee.

That wasn’t it either.

He clambered through a bulkhead door and found himself in a large corridor. Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he walked toward the other.

He came to an observation monitor let into the wall behind a plate of toughened but still badly scratched Plexiglas.

“Would you turn it down please?” he asked Ford Prefect who was crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video equipment he’d taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court Road, having first hurled a small brick through it, and also a heap of empty beer cans.

“Shhhh!” hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at the screen. He was watching
The Magnificent Seven.

“Just a bit,” said Arthur.

“No!” shouted Ford. “We’re just getting to the good bit! Listen, I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion, everything, and this is the good bit!”

With a sigh and a headache, Arthur sat down beside him and watched the good bit. He listened to Ford’s whoops and yells and yeeehays as placidly as he could.

“Ford,” he said eventually, when it was all over, and Ford was hunting through a stack of cassettes for the tape of
Casablanca
, “how come, if … “

“This is the big one,” said Ford. “This is the one I came back for. Do you realize I never saw it all the way through? I always missed the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came. When they blew the place up I thought I’d never get to see it. Hey, what happened with all that anyway?”

“Just life,” said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.

“Oh, that again,” said Ford. “I thought it might be something like that. I prefer this stuff,” he said as Rick’s bar flickered onto the screen. “How come if what?”

“What?”

“You started to say, ‘how come if … ’ ”

“How come if you’re so rude about the Earth, that you … Oh, never mind, let’s just watch the movie.”

“Exactly,” said Ford.

T
here remains little still to tell.

Beyond what used to be known as the Limitless Lightfields of Flanux until the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine were discovered lying behind them, lie the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine.

Within the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine lies the star named Zarss, around which orbits the planet Preliumtarn in which is the land of Sevorbeupstry, and it was to the land of Sevorbeupstry that Arthur and Fenchurch came at last, a little tired by the journey.

And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they came to the Great Red Plain of Rars, which was bounded on the south side by the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, on the farther side of which, according to the dying words of Prak, they would find in thirty-foot-high letters of fire God’s Final Message to His Creation.