ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything
Page 17
"I am," Marvin acknowledged bitterly, "in particularly scintillating form
at the moment."
Zaphod poked his head in through the hatchway and looked around.
"Are you alone?" he said.
"Yes," said Marvin. "Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my only
companions. And vast intelligence of course. And infinite sorrow. And ..."
"Yeah," said Zaphod. "Hey, what's your connection with all this?"
"This," said Marvin, indicating with his less damaged arm all the
electrodes which connected him with the Krikkit computer.
"Then," said Zaphod awkwardly, "I guess you must have saved my life.
Twice."
"Three times," said Marvin.
Zaphod's head snapped round (his other one was looking hawkishly in
entirely the wrong direction) just in time to see the lethal killer robot
directly behind him seize up and start to smoke. It staggered backwards and
slumped against a wall. It slid down it. It slipped sideways, threw its head
back and started to sob inconsolably.
Zaphod looked back at Marvin.
"You must have a terrific outlook on life," he said.
"Just don't even ask," said Marvin.
"I won't," said Zaphod, and didn't. "Hey look," he added, "you're doing a
terrific job."
"Which means, I suppose," said Marvin, requiring only one ten thousand
million billion trillion grillionth part of his mental powers to make this
particular logical leap, "that you're not going to release me or anything like
that."
"Kid, you know I'd love to."
"But you're not going to."
"No."
"I see."
"You're working well."
"Yes," said Marvin. "Why stop now just when I'm hating it?"
"I got to find Trillian and the guys. Hey, you any idea where they are? I
mean, I just got a planet to choose from. Could take a while."
"They are very close," said Marvin dolefully. "You can monitor them from
here if you like."
"I better go get them," asserted Zaphod. "Er, maybe they need some help,
right?"
"Maybe," said Marvin with unexpected authority in his lugubrious voice,
"it would be better if you monitored them from here. That young girl," he
added unexpectedly, "is one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms
it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."
Zaphod took a moment or two to find his way through this labyrinthine
string of negatives and emerged at the other end with surprise.
"Trillian?" he said. "She's just a kid. Cute, yeah, but temperamental. You
know how it is with women. Or perhaps you don't. I assume you don't. If you do
I don't want to hear about it. Plug us in."
"... totally manipulated."
"What?" said Zaphod.
It was Trillian speaking. He turned round.
The wall against which the Krikkit robot was sobbing had lit up to reveal
a scene taking place in some other unknown part of the Krikkit Robot War
zones. It seemed to be a council chamber of some kind - Zaphod couldn't make
it out too clearly because of the robot slumped against the screen.
He tried to move the robot, but it was heavy with its grief and tried to
bite him, so he just looked around as best he could.
"Just think about it," said Trillian's voice, "your history is just a
series of freakishly improbable events. And I know an improbable event when I
see one. Your complete isolation from the Galaxy was freakish for a start.
Right out on the very edge with a Dust Cloud around you. It's a set-up.
Obviously."
Zaphod was mad with frustration because he couldn't see the screen. The
robot's head was obscuring his view of the people Trillian as talking to, his
multi-functional battleclub was obscuring the background, and the elbow of the
arm it had pressed tragically against its brow was obscuring Trillian herself.
"Then," said Trillian, "this spaceship that crash-landed on your planet.
That's really likely, isn't it? Have you any idea of what the odds are against
a drifting spaceship accidentally intersecting with the orbit of a planet?"
"Hey," said Zaphod, "she doesn't know what the zark she's talking about.
I've seen that spaceship. It's a fake. No deal."
"I thought it might be," said Marvin from his prison behind Zaphod.
"Oh yeah," said Zaphod. "It's easy for you to say that. I just told you.
Anyway, I don't see what it's got to do with anything."
"And especially," continued Trillian, "the odds against it intersecting
with the orbit of the one planet in the Galaxy, or the whole of the Universe
as far as I know, that would be totally traumatized to see it. You don't know
what the odds are? Nor do I, they're that big. Again, it's a set-up. I
wouldn't be surprised if that spaceship was just a fake."
Zaphod managed to move the robot's battleclub. Behind it on the screen
were the figures of Ford, Arthur and Slartibartfast who appeared astonished
and bewildered by the whole thing.
"Hey, look," said Zaphod excitedly. "The guys are doing great. Ra ra ra!
Go get 'em, guys."
"And what about," said Trillian, "all this technology you suddenly managed
to build for yourselves almost overnight? Most people would take thousands of
years to do all that. Someone was feeding you what you needed to know, someone
was keeping you at it.
"I know, I know," she added in response to an unseen interruption, "I know
you didn't realize it was going on. This is exactly my point. You never
realized anything at all. Like this Supernova Bomb."
"How do you know about that?" said an unseen voice.
"I just know," said Trillian. "You expect me to believe that you are
bright enough to invent something that brilliant and be too dumb to realize it
would take you with it as well? That's not just stupid, that is spectacularly
obtuse."
"Hey, what's this bomb thing?" said Zaphod in alarm to Marvin.
"The supernova bomb?" said Marvin. "It's a very, very small bomb."
"Yeah?"
"That would destroy the Universe in toto," added Marvin. "Good idea, if
you ask me. They won't get it to work, though."
"Why not, if it's so brilliant?"
"It's brilliant," said Marvin, "they're not. They got as far as designing
it before they were locked in the envelope. They've spent the last five years
building it. They think they've got it right but they haven't. They're as
stupid as any other organic life form. I hate them."
Trillian was continuing.
Zaphod tried to pull the Krikkit robot away by its leg, but it kicked and
growled at him, and then quaked with a fresh outburst of sobbing. Then
suddenly it slumped over and continued to express its feelings out of
everybody's way on the floor.
Trillian was standing alone in the middle of the chamber tired out but
with fiercely burning eyes.
Ranged in front of her were the pale-faced and wrinkled Elder Masters of
Krikkit, motionless behind their widely curved control desk, staring at her
with helpless fear and hatred.
In front of them, equidistant between their control desk and the middle of
the chamber, where Trillian stood, as if on trial, was
a slim white pillar
about four feet tall. On top of it stood a small white globe, about three,
maybe four inches in diameter.
Beside it stood a Krikkit robot with its multi-functional battleclub.
"In fact," explained Trillian, "you are so dumb stupid" (She was sweating.
Zaphod felt that this was an unattractive thing for her to be doing at this
point) "you are all so dumb stupid that I doubt, I very much doubt, that
you've been able to build the bomb properly without any help from Hactar for
the last five years."
"Who's this guy Hactar?" said Zaphod, squaring his shoulders.
If Marvin replied, Zaphod didn't hear him. All his attention was
concentrated on the screen.
One of the Elders of Krikkit made a small motion with his hand towards the
Krikkit robot. The robot raised his club.
"There's nothing I can do," said Marvin. "It's on an independent circuit
from the others."
"Wait," said Trillian.
The Elder made a small motion. The robot halted. Trillian suddenly seemed
very doubtful of her own judgment.
"How do you know all this?" said Zaphod to Marvin at this point.
"Computer records," said Marvin. "I have access."
"You're very different, aren't you," said Trillian to the Elder Masters,
"from your fellow worldlings down on the ground. You've spent all your lives
up here, unprotected by the atmosphere. You've been very vulnerable. The rest
of your race is very frightened, you know, they don't want you to do this.
You're out of touch, why don't you check up?"
The Krikkit Elder grew impatient. He made a gesture to the robot which was
precisely the opposite of the gesture he had last made to it.
The robot swung its battleclub. It hit the small white globe.
The small white globe was the supernova bomb.
It was a very, very small bomb which was designed to bring the entire
Universe to an end.
The supernova bomb flew through the air. It hit the back wall of the
council chamber and dented it very badly.
"So how does she know all this?" said Zaphod.
Marvin kept a sullen silence.
"Probably just bluffing," said Zaphod. "Poor kid, I should never have left
her alone."
Chapter 32
"Hactar!" called Trillian. "What are you up to?"
There was no reply from the enclosing darkness. Trillian waited,
nervously. She was sure that she couldn't be wrong. She peered into the gloom
from which she had been expecting some kind of response. But there was only
cold silence.
"Hactar?" she called again. "I would like you to meet my friend Arthur
Dent. I wanted to go off with a Thunder God, but he wouldn't let me and I
appreciate that. He made me realize where my affections really lay.
Unfortunately Zaphod is too frightened by all this, so I brought Arthur
instead. I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this.
"Hello?" she said again. "Hactar?"
And then it came.
It was thin and feeble, like a voice carried on the wind from a great
distance, half heard, a memory of a dream of a voice.
"Won't you both come out," said the voice. "I promise that you will be
perfectly safe."
They glanced at each other, and then stepped out, improbably, along the
shaft of light which streamed out of the open hatchway of the Heart of Gold
into the dim granular darkness of the Dust Cloud.
Arthur tried to hold her hand to steady and reassure her, but she wouldn't
let him. He held on to his airline hold-all with its tin of Greek olive oil,
its towel, its crumpled postcards of Santorini and its other odds and ends. He
steadied and reassured that instead.
They were standing on, and in, nothing.
Murky, dusty nothing. Each grain of dust of the pulverized computer
sparkled dimly as it turned and twisted slowly, catching the sunlight in the
darkness. Each particle of the computer, each speck of dust, held within
itself, faintly and weakly, the pattern of the whole. In reducing the computer
to dust the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax had merely crippled the
computer, not killed it. A weak and insubstantial field held the particles in
slight relationships with each other.
Arthur and Trillian stood, or rather floated, in the middle of this
bizarre entity. They had nothing to breathe, but for the moment this seemed
not to matter. Hactar kept his promise. They were safe. For the moment.
"I have nothing to offer you by way of hospitality," said Hactar faintly,
"but tricks of the light. It is possible to be comfortable with tricks of the
light, though, if that is all you have."
His voice evanesced, and in the dark dust a long velvet paisleycovered
sofa coalesced into hazy shape.
Arthur could hardly bear the fact that it was the same sofa which had
appeared to him in the fields of prehistoric Earth. He wanted to shout and
shake with rage that the Universe kept doing these insanely bewildering things
to him.
He let this feeling subside, and then sat on the sofa - carefully.
Trillian sat on it too.
It was real.
At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that is what
sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa.
The voice on the solar wind breathed to them again.
"I hope you are comfortable," it said.
They nodded.
"And I would like to congratulate you on the accuracy of your deductions."
Arthur quickly pointed out that he hadn't deduced anything much himself,
Trillian was the one. She had simply asked him along because he was interested
in life, the Universe, and everything.
"That is something in which I too am interested," breathed Hactar.
"Well," said Arthur, "we should have a chat about it sometime. Over a cup
of tea."
There slowly materialized in front of them a small wooden table on which
sat a silver teapot, a bone china milk jug, a bone china sugar bowl, and two
bone china cups and saucers.
Arthur reached forward, but they were just a trick of the light. He leaned
back on the sofa, which was an illusion his body was prepared to accept as
comfortable.
"Why," said Trillian, "do you feel you have to destroy the Universe?"
She found it a little difficult talking into nothingness, with nothing on
which to focus. Hactar obviously noticed this. He chuckled a ghostly chuckle.
"If it's going to be that sort of session," he said, "we may as well have
the right sort of setting."
And now there materialized in front of them something new. It was the dim
hazy image of a couch - a psychiatrist's couch. The leather with which it was
upholstered was shiny and sumptuous, but again, it was only a trick of the
light.
Around them, to complete the setting, was the hazy suggestion of wood+
panelled walls. And then, on the couch, appeared the image of Hactar himself,
and it was an eye-twisting image.
The couch looked normal size for a psychiatrist's couch - about five or
six feet long.
The computer looked normal size for a black space-borne computer satellite
- about a thousand miles acr
oss.
The illusion that the one was sitting on top of the other was the thing
which made the eyes twist.
"All right," said Trillian firmly. She stood up off the sofa. She felt
that she was being asked to feel too comfortable and to accept too many
illusions.
"Very good," she said. "Can you construct real things too? I mean solid
objects?"
Again there was a pause before the answer, as if the pulverized mind of
Hactar had to collect its thoughts from the millions and millions of miles
over which it was scattered.
"Ah," he sighed. "You are thinking of the spaceship."
Thoughts seemed to drift by them and through them, like waves through the
ether.
"Yes," he acknowledge, "I can.
"But it takes enormous effort and time. All I can do in my ... particle
state, you see, is encourage and suggest. Encourage and suggest. And suggest
..."
The image of Hactar on the couch seemed to billow and waver, as if finding
it hard to maintain itself.
It gathered new strength.
"I can encourage and suggest," it said, "tiny pieces of space debris - the
odd minute meteor, a few molecules here, a few hydrogen atoms there - to move
together. I encourage them together. I can tease them into shape, but it takes
many aeons."
"So, did you make," asked Trillian again, "the model of the wrecked
spacecraft?"
"Er ... yes," murmured Hactar. "I have made ... a few things. I can move
them about. I made the spacecraft. It seemed best to do."
Something then made Arthur pick up his hold-all from where he had left it
on the sofa and grasp it tightly.
The mist of Hactar's ancient shattered mind swirled about them as if
uneasy dreams were moving through it.
"I repented, you see," he murmured dolefully. "I repented of sabotaging my
own design for the Silastic Armorfiends. It was not my place to make such
decisions. I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated
my own existence."
Hactar sighed, and they waited in silence for him to continue his story.
"You were right," he said at length. "I deliberately nurtured the planet
of Krikkit till they would arrive at the same state of mind as the Silastic
Armorfiends, and require of me the design of the bomb I failed to make the
first time. I wrapped myself around the planet and coddled it. Under the