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.”
39
Arthur 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.
40
There 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.
According to Prak, if Arthur’s memory served him right, the place was guarded by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob, and so, after a manner, it proved to be. He was a little man in a strange hat and he sold them a ticket.
“Keep to the left, please,” he said, “keep to the left,” and hurried past them on a little scooter.
They realized they were not the first to pass that way, for the path that led around the left of the Great Red Plain was well worn and dotted with booths. At one they bought a box of fudge, which had been baked in an oven in a cave in the mountain, which was heated by the fire of the letters that formed God’s Final Message to His Creation. At another they bought some postcards. The letters had been blurred with an airbrush, “So as not to spoil the Big Surprise!” it said on the reverse.
“Do you know what the message is?” they asked the wizened little lady in the booth.
“Oh yes,” she piped cheerily, “oh yes!”
She waved them on.
Every twenty miles or so there was a little stone hut with showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain, and the Great Red Plain rippled in the heat.
“Is it possible,” asked Arthur at one of the larger booths, “to rent one of those little scooters? Like the one Lajestic Ventrawhatsit had?”
“The scooters,” said the little lady who was serving at the ice cream bar, “are not for the devout.”
“Oh well, that’s easy then,” said Fenchurch, “we’re not particularly devout. We’re just interested.”
“Then you must turn back now,” said the little lady severely, and when they demurred, sold them a couple of Final Message sun hats and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around each other on the Great Red Plain of Rars.
They drank a couple of sodas in the shade of the booth and then trudged out into the sun again.
“We’re running out of barrier cream,” said Fenchurch after a few m
ore miles. “We can go to the next booth, or we can return to the previous one which is nearer, but means we have to retrace our steps.”
They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the heat haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on.
They then discovered that they were not only not the first to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making it now.
Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape was heaving itself wretchedly along the ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half limping, half crawling.
It was moving so slowly that before too long they caught the creature up and could see that it was made of worn, scarred, and twisted metal.
It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in the hot, dry dust.
“So much time,” it groaned, “oh, so much time. And pain as well, so much of that, and so much time to suffer in it, too. One or the other on its own I could probably manage. It’s the two together that really get me down. Oh, hello, you again.”
“Marvin?” said Arthur sharply, crouching down beside it. “Is that you?”
“You were always one,” groaned the aged husk of the robot, “for the superintelligent question, weren’t you?”
“What is it?” whispered Fenchurch in alarm, crouching behind Arthur, and grasping his arm.
“He’s sort of an old friend,” said Arthur, “I—”
“Friend!” croaked the robot pathetically. The word died away in a kind of dry crackle and flakes of rust fell out of his mouth. “You’ll have to excuse me while I try and remember what the word means. My memory banks are not what they were, you know, and any word which falls into disuse for a few zillion years has to get shifted down into auxiliary memory backup. Ah, here it comes.”
The robot’s battered head snapped up a bit as if in thought.
“Hmm,” he said, “what a curious concept.”
He thought a little longer.
“No,” he said at last, “don’t think I ever came across one of those. Sorry, can’t help you there.”
He scraped a knee along pathetically in the dust, and then tried to twist himself up onto his misshapen elbows.
“Is there any last service you would like me to perform for you perhaps?” he asked in a kind of hollow rattle. “A piece of paper that perhaps you would like me to pick up for you? Or maybe you would like me,” he continued, “to open a door?”
His head scratched round in its rusty neck bearings and seemed to scan the distant horizon.
“Don’t seem to be any doors around at present,” he said, “but I’m sure that if we waited long enough, someone would build one. And then,” he said slowly, twisting his head around to see Arthur again, “I could open it for you. I’m quite used to waiting, you know.”
“Arthur,” hissed Fenchurch in his ear sharply, “you never told me of this. What have you done to this poor creature?”
“Nothing,” insisted Arthur sadly, “he’s always like this—”
“Ha!” snapped Marvin. “Ha!” he repeated, “what do you know of always? You say ‘always’ to me, who, because of the silly little errands your organic life forms keep on sending me through time on, am now thirty-seven times older than the Universe itself? Pick your words with a little more care,” he coughed, “and tact.”
He rasped his way through a coughing fit and resumed.
“Leave me,” he said, “go on ahead, leave me to struggle painfully on my way. My time at last is nearly come. My race is nearly run. I fully expect,” he said, feebly waving them on with a broken finger, “to come in last. It would be fitting. Here I am, brain the size—”
“Shut up,” said Arthur.
Between them they picked him up despite his feeble protests and insults. The metal was so hot it nearly blistered their fingers, but he weighed now surprisingly little, and hung limply between their arms.
They carried him with them along the path that ran along the left of the Great Red Plain of Rars toward the south-encircling mountains of Quentulus Quazgar.
Arthur attempted to explain to Fenchurch, but was too often interrupted by Marvin’s dolorous cybernetic ravings.
They tried to see if they could get him some spare parts at one of the booths, and some soothing oil, but Marvin would have none of it.
“I’m all spare parts,” he droned.
“Let me be!” he groaned.
“Every part of me,” he moaned, “has been replaced at least fifty times … except …” He seemed almost imperceptibly to brighten for a moment. His head bobbed between them with the effort of memory. “Do you remember, the first time you ever met me,” he said at last to Arthur, “I had been given the intellect-stretching task of taking you up to the bridge? I mentioned to you that I had this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side? That I had asked for them to be replaced but they never were?”
He left a longish pause before he continued. They carried him on between them, under the baking sun that hardly ever seemed to move, let alone set.
“See if you can guess,” said Marvin, when he judged that the pause had become embarrassing enough, “which parts of me were never replaced? Go on, see if you can guess.
“Ouch,” he added, “ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.”
At last they reached the last of the little booths, set Marvin down between them, and rested in the shade. Fenchurch bought some cuff links for Russell, cuff links that had set in them little polished pebbles which had been picked up from the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, directly underneath the letters of fire in which were written God’s Final Message to His Creation.
Arthur flipped through a little rack of devotional tracts on the counter, little meditations on the meaning of the Message.
“Ready?” he said to Fenchurch, who nodded.
They heaved up Marvin between them.
They rounded the foot of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, and there was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest of the mountain. There was a little observation vantage point with a rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from which you could get a good view. It had a little pay telescope for looking at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance of the heavens and would, if seen through a telescope, have severely damaged the retina and optic nerve.
They gazed at God’s Final Message to His Creation in wonderment, and were slowly and ineffably filled with a great sense of peace, and of final and complete understanding.
Fenchurch sighed. “Yes,” she said, “that was it.”
They had been staring at it for fully ten minutes before they became aware that Marvin, hanging between their shoulders, was in difficulties. The robot could no longer lift his head, had not read the message. They lifted his head, but he complained that his vision circuits had almost gone.
They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He complained and insulted them, but they helped him look at each individual letter in turn. The first letter was a “w,” the second an “e.” Then there was a gap. An “a” followed, then a “p,” an “o,” and an “l.”
Marvin paused for a rest.
After a few moments they resumed and let him see the “o,” the “g,” the “i,” the “z,” and the “e.”
The next two words were “for” and “the.” The last one was a long one, and Marvin needed another rest before he could tackle it.
It started with “i,” then “n,” then “c.” Next came an “o” and an “n,” followed by a “v,” an “e,” another “n,” and an “i.”
After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength for the last stretch.
He read the “e,” the “n,” the “c,” and at last the final “e,” and staggered back into their arms.
“I think,” he murmured at last from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax, “I feel good about it.”
The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.
Luckily, th
ere was a stall nearby where you could rent scooters from guys with green wings.
Epilogue
One of the greatest benefactors of all lifekind was a man who couldn’t keep his mind on the job at hand.
Brilliant?
Certainly.
One of the foremost genetic engineers of his or any other generation, including a number he had designed himself?
Without a doubt.
The problem was that he was far too interested in things which he shouldn’t be interested in, at least, as people would tell him, not now.
He was also, partly because of this, of a rather irritable disposition.
So when his world was threatened by terrible invaders from a distant star, who were still a fair way off but traveling fast, he, Blart Versenwald III (his name was Blart Versenwald III, which is not strictly relevant, but quite interesting because—never mind, that was his name and we can talk about why it’s interesting later), was sent into guarded seclusion by the masters of his race with instructions to design a breed of fanatical superwarriors to resist and vanquish the feared invaders, do it quickly and, they told him, “Concentrate!”
So he sat by a window and looked out at a summer lawn and designed and designed and designed, but inevitably got a little distracted by things, and by the time the invaders were practically in orbit round them, had come up with a remarkable new breed of superfly that could, unaided, figure out how to fly through the open half of a half-open window, and also an off switch for children. Celebrations of these remarkable achievements seemed doomed to be short-lived because disaster was imminent as the alien ships were landing. But, astoundingly, the fearsome invaders who, like most warlike races were only on the rampage because they couldn’t cope with things at home, were stunned by Versenwald’s extraordinary breakthroughs, joined in the celebrations and were instantly prevailed upon to sign a wide-ranging series of trading agreements and set up a program of cultural exchanges. And, in an astonishing reversal of normal practice in the conduct of such matters, everybody concerned lived happily ever after.
Volume 4 - So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish Page 15