ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Life, the Universe

  "I like that hat!" he bawled.

  "What?"

  "I said, I like the hat."

  "I'm not wearing a hat."

  "Well, I like the head, then."

  "What?"

  "I said, I like the head. Interesting bone-structure."

  "What?"

  Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of other movements he was

  performing.

  "I said, you dance great," he shouted, "just don't nod so much."

  "What?"

  "It's just that every time you nod," said Ford, "... ow!" he added as his

  partner nodded forward to say "What?" and once again pecked him sharply on the

  forehead with the sharp end of her swept-forward skull.

  "My planet was blown up one morning," said Arthur, who had found himself

  quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story or, at least, edited

  highlights of it, "that's why I'm dressed like this, in my dressing gown. My

  planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see. I didn't realize I'd

  be coming to a party."

  The little man nodded enthusiastically.

  "Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing gown. Rather

  than the space suit one would normally expect. Shortly after that I discovered

  that my planet had originally been built for a bunch of mice. You can imagine

  how I felt about that. I was then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I

  have been blown up ridiculously often, shot at, insulted, regularly

  disintegrated, deprived of tea, and recently I crashed into a swamp and had to

  spend five years in a damp cave."

  "Ah," effervesced the little man, "and did you have a wonderful time?"

  Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.

  "What a wonderful exciting cough," said the little man, quite startled by

  it, "do you mind if I join you?"

  And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit

  of coughing which caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke

  violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused.

  Together they performed a lung-busting duet which went on for fully two

  minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt.

  "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 learnt 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 were 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.

  "OK," 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 shit?" 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!!!"

  "OK, I'm going," said Arthur hurriedly.

  "It's been real." The man gave a sharp wave and disappeared off into the

  throng.

  "What was that about?" said Arthur to a girl he found standing beside him.

  "Why did he tell me to win awards?"

  "Just showbiz talk," shrugged the girl. "He's just won an award at the

  Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards Ceremony, and

  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 `Fuck' In A Serious Screenplay. It's

  very prestigious."

  "I see," said Arthur, "yes, and what do you get for that?"

  "A Rory. 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 `wop'."

  "Said what?"

  "Wop."

  People had been dropping in on the party now for some years, fashionable

  gatecrashers 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 biscuit 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 to be 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

  which seemed to be half sticking through it. Together they were lurching,

  heaving and spinning their way round the sky in grotesque disregard of their

  own weight.

  The clouds parted. The air roared and leapt 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, whilst 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 whilst 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 span 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 brokenbacked 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 `Fuck'

  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 amongst

  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 crisps 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 be flying off ..."

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

  "Upstairs," said Thor, "I was weighing her. Flying's 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 smouldering 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, 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 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

  upwards 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 any 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."

  Chapter 23

  "All 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 which

  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 pseudo-glass 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 crisps?" said Ford.

  "They are both," said Slartibartfast, without looking up, "in the Room of

  Informational Illusions. I think that your young lady friend is trying to

  understand some problems of Galactic history. I think the potato crisps are

  probably helping her."

  Chapter 24

  It is a mistake to think you can solve any major
problems just with

  potatoes.

  For instance, there was once an insanely aggressive race of people called

  the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of their race.

  The name of their army was something quite horrific. Luckily they lived even

  further back in Galactic history than anything we have so far encountered -

  twenty billion years ago - when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea

  worth fighting for was a new one.

  And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were good at,

  and being good at it, they did a lot. They fought their enemies (i.e.

  everybody else), they fought each other. Their planet was a complete wreck.

  The surface was littered with abandoned cities which were surrounded by

  abandoned war machines, which were in turn surrounded by deep bunkers in which

  the Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.

  The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was just to be

  born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got

  resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way of life, one might think, but

  they did seem to have an awful lot of energy.

  The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him into a

  room of his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.

  Eventually they realized that this was something they were going to have

  to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a

  weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards,

  primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every

  day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus

  aggressions.

  For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be much

  more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead.

  This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things, and

  they all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for weeks.

  Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax is that they

  were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer.

  It was a gigantic spaceborne computer called Hactar, which to this day is

  remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. It was the first to be

  built like a natural brain, in that every cellular particle of it carried the

  pattern of the whole within it, which enabled it to think more flexibly and