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 Megaleach 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 gave one of his smiles which made people twitch.
Slartibartfast had hoped for an easy retirement.
He had been planning to learn to play the octraventral 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 which 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
hap?"
"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 a 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
which explodes at almost half the speed of light and burns with the brightness
of a billion suns and then collapses as a super-heavy neutron star. It's a
star which 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 dilletantes,
eccentrics, layabouts, fartarounds 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 leant 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.
Chapter 17
Time 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 hypermathematics, 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 the
single event which 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 being 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 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 drier.
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 on that effect.
They travelled 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 an effect that he became extremely rich at
their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write which
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 chat 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 a
stack of dried habra leaves to copy them out on to, 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 sure 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 for ever. The Campaign for Real Timers
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."
Chapter 18
Arthur materialized, and did so with all the customary staggering about
and clasping at his throat, heart and various limbs which he still indulged
himself in whenever he made any of these hateful and painful materializations
that he was determined not to let himself get used to.
He looked around for the others.
They weren't there.
He looked around for the others again.
They still weren't there.
He closed his eyes.
He opened them
He looked around for the others.
They obstinately persisted in their absence.
He closed his eyes again, preparatory to making this completely futile
exercise once more, and because it was only then, whilst his eyes were closed,
that his brain began to register what his eyes had been looking at whilst they
were open, a puzzled frown crept across his face.
So he opened his eyes again to check his facts and the frown stayed put.
If anything, it intensified, and got a good firm grip. If this was a party
it was a very bad one, so bad, in fact, that everybody else had left. He
abandoned this line of thought as futile. Obviously this wasn't a party. It
was a cave, or a labyrinth, or a tunnel of something - there was insufficient
light to tell. All was darkness, a damp shiny darkness. The only sounds were
the echoes of his own breathing, which sounded worried. He coughed very
slightly, and then had to listen to the thin ghostly echo of his cough
trailing away amongst winding corridors and sightless chambers, as of some
great labyrinth, and eventually returning to him via the same unseen
corridors, as if to say ... "Yes?"
This happened to every slightest noise he made, and it unnerved him. He
tried to hum a cheery tune, but by the time it returned to him it was a hollow
dirge and he stopped.
His mind was suddenly full of images from the story that Slartibartfast
had been telling him. He half-expected suddenly to see lethal white robots
step silently from the shadows and kill him. He caught his breath. They
didn't. He let it go again. He didn't know what he did expect.
Someone or something, however, seemed to be expecting him, for at that
moment there lit up suddenly in the dark distance an eerie green neon sign.
It said, silently:
You have been Diverted
The sign flicked off again, in a way which Arthur was not at all certain
he liked. It flicked off with a sort of contemptuous flourish. Arthur then
tried to assure himself that this was just a ridiculous trick of his
imagination. A neon sign is either on or off, depending on whether it has
electricity running through it or not. There was no way, he told himself, that
it could possibly effect the transition from one state to the other with a
contemptuous flourish. He hugged himself tightly in his dressing gown and
shivered, nevertheless.
The neon sign in the depths now suddenly lit up, bafflingly, with just
three dots and a comma. Like this:
Only in green neon.
It was trying, Arthur realized after staring at this perplexedly for a
second or two, to indicate that there was more to come, that the sentence was
not complete. Trying with almost superhuman pedantry, he reflected. Or at
least, inhuman pedantry.
The sentence then completed itself with these two words:
Arthur Dent.
He reeled. He steadied himself to have another clear look at it. It still
said Arthur Dent, so he reeled again.
Once again, the sign flicked off, and left him blinking in the darkness
with just the dim red image of his name jumping on his retina.
Welcome, the sign now suddenly said.
After a moment, it added:
I Don't Think.
The stone-cold fear which had been hovering about Arthur all this time,
waiting for its moment, recognized that its moment had now come and pounced on
him. He tried to fight it off. He dropped into a kind of alert crouch that he
had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with
stronger knees. He peered huntedly into the darkness.
"Er, hello?" he said.
He cleared his throat
and said it again, more loudly and without the "er".
At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started
to beat on a bass drum.
He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his
heart beating.
He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn't his heart
beating, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves, and leapt off. He
put a hand out on the floor to steady his alert crouch, which wasn't holding
up very well. The sign changed itself again. It said:
Do Not be Alarmed.
After a pause, it added:
Be Very Very Frightened, Arthur Dent.
Once again it flicked off. Once again it left him in darkness. His eyes
seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn't certain if this was because
they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at
this point.
"Hello?" he said again, this time trying to put a note of rugged and
aggressive self-assertion into it. "Is anyone there?"
There was no reply, nothing.
This unnerved Arthur Dent even more than a reply would have done, and he
began to back away from the scary nothingness. And the more he backed away,
the more scared he became. After a while he realized that the reason for this
was because of all the films he had seen in which the hero backs further and
further away from some imagined terror in front of him, only to bump into it
coming up from behind.
Just then it suddenly occurred to him to turn round rather quickly.
There was nothing there.
Just blackness.
This really unnerved him, and he started to back away from that, back the
way he had come.
After doing this for a short while it suddenly occurred to him that he was
now backing towards whatever it was he had been backing away from in the first
place.
This, he couldn't help thinking, must be a foolish thing to do. He decided
he would be better off backing the way he had first been backing, and turned
around again.
It turned out at this point that his second impulse had been the correct
one, because there was an indescribably hideous monster standing quietly
behind him. Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his
ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything Page 10