`Look,' he said in a stern voice. But he wasn't certain how far
saying things like `Look' in a stern voice was necessarily going to
get him, and time was not on his side. What the hell, he thought,
you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window.
That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.
11
The first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he realised resignedly,
was to get himself a life. This meant he had to find a planet
he could have one on. It had to be a planet he could breathe
on, where he could stand up and sit down without experiencing
gravitational discomfort. It had to be somewhere where the acid
levels were low and the plants didn't actually attack you.
`I hate to be anthropic about this,' he said to the strange
thing behind the desk at the Resettlement Advice Centre on
Pintleton Alpha, `but I'd quite like to live somewhere where
the people look vaguely like me as well. You know. Sort of
human.'
The strange thing behind the desk waved some of its stranger
bits around and seemed rather taken aback by this. It oozed and
glopped off its seat, thrashed its way slowly across the floor,
ingested the old metal filing cabinet and then, with a great
belch, excreted the appropriate drawer. It popped out a couple
of glistening tentacles from its ear, removed some files from the
drawer, sucked the drawer back in and vomited up the cabinet
again. It thrashed its way back across the floor, slimed its way
back up on to the seat and slapped the files on the table.
`See anything you fancy?' it asked.
Arthur looked nervously through some grubby and damp
pieces of paper. He was definitely in some backwater part of
the Galaxy here, and somewhere off to the left as far as the
universe he knew and recognised was concerned. In the space
where his own home should have been there was a rotten hick
planet, drowned with rain and inhabited by thugs and boghogs.
Even The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed to work
only fitfully here, which was why he was reduced to making these
sorts of enquiries in these sorts of places. One place he always
asked after was Stavromula Beta, but no one had ever heard of
such a planet.
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little
to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had
been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally
came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and
armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He
couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster.
He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was
not a lot of demand for his services.
Arthur's heart sank. This surprised him, because he thought
it was already about as low as it could possibly be. He closed
his eyes for a moment. He so much wanted to be home. He
so much wanted his own home world, the actual Earth he had
grown up on, not to have been demolished. He so much wanted
none of this to have happened. He so much wanted that when he
opened his eyes again he would be standing on the doorstep of his
little cottage in the west country of England, that the sun would
be shining over the green hills, the post van would be going up
the lane, the daffodils would be blooming in his garden, and in
the distance the pub would be opening for lunch. He so much
wanted to take the newspaper down to the pub and read it over
a pint of bitter. He so much wanted to do the crossword. He so
much wanted to be able to get completely stuck on 17 across.
He opened his eyes.
The strange thing was pulsating irritably at him, tapping
some kind of pseudopodia on the desk.
Arthur shook his head and looked at the next sheet of paper.
Grim, he thought. And the next.
Very grim. And the next.
Oh... Now that looked better.
It was a world called Bartledan. It had oxygen. It had green
hills. It even, it seemed, had a renowned literary culture. But
the thing that most aroused his interest was a photograph of a
small bunch of Bartledanian people, standing around in a village
square, smiling pleasantly at the camera.
`Ah,' he said, and held the picture up to the strange thing
behind the desk.
Its eyes squirmed out on stalks and roiled up and down
the piece of paper, leaving a glistening trail of slime all over
it.
`Yes,' it said with distaste. `They do look exactly like you.'
Arthur moved to Bartledan and, using some money he had
made by selling some toenail clippings and spit to a DNA
bank, he bought himself a room in the village featured in the
picture. It was pleasant there. The air was balmy. The people
looked like him and seemed not to mind him being there. They
didn't attack him with anything. He bought some clothes and a
cupboard to put them in.
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.
At first he tried to sit and read. But the literature of Bartledan,
famed though it was throughout this sector of the Galaxy for its
subtlety and grace, didn't seem to be able to sustain his interest.
The problem was that it wasn't actually about human beings after
all. It wasn't about what human beings wanted. The people of
Bartledan were remarkably like human beings to look at, but
when you said `Good evening' to one, he would tend to look
around with a slight sense of surprise, sniff the air and say that,
yes, he supposed that it probably was a goodish evening now that
Arthur came to mention it.
`No, what I meant was to wish you a good evening,' Arthur
would say, or rather, used to say. He soon learned to avoid these
conversations. `I mean that I hope you have a good evening,' he
would add.
More puzzlement.
`Wish?' the Bartledanian would say at last, in polite bafflement.
`Er, yes,' Arthur would then have said. `I'm just expressing
the hope that...'
`Hope?'
`Yes.'
`What is hope?'
Good question, thought Arthur to himself, and retreated
back to his room to think about things.
On the one hand he could only recognise and respect what he
learnt about the Bartledanian view of the universe, which was
that the universe was what the universe was, take it or leave it.
On the other hand he could not help but feel that not to desire
anything, not ever to. wish or to hope, was just not natural.
Natural. There was a tricky word.
He had long ago realised that a lot of things that he had
thought of as natural, like buying people presents at Christmas,
stopping at red lights or falling at a rate of 32 feet/second/second,
were just the habits of his own world and didn't necessarily work
the same way anywhere else; but not to wish - that really couldn't
be natural, could it? That would be like not breathing.
Breathing was another thing that the Bartledanians didn't
do, desp
ite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. They just stood
there. Occasionally they ran around and played netball and stuff
(without ever wishing to win though, of course - they would just
play, and whoever won, won), but they never actually breathed.
It was, for some reason, unnecessary. Arthur quickly learned
that playing netball with them was just too spooky. Though they
looked like humans, and even moved and sounded like humans,
they didn't breathe and they didn't wish for things.
Breathing and wishing for things, on the other hand, was
just about all that Arthur seemed to do all day. Sometimes
he would wish for things so much that his breathing would get
quite agitated, and he would have to go and lie down for a bit.
On his own. In his small room. So far from the world which had
given birth to him that his brain could not even process the sort
of numbers involved without just going limp.
He preferred not to think about it. He preferred just to sit
and read - or at least he would prefer it if there was anything
worth reading. But nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted
anything. Not even a glass of water. Certainly, they would fetch
one if they were thirsty, but if there wasn't one available, they
would think no more about it. He had just read an entire book
in which the main character had, over the course of a week, done
some work in his garden, played a great deal of netball, helped
mend a road, fathered a child on his wife and then unexpectedly
died of thirst just before the last chapter. In exasperation Arthur
had combed his way back through the book and in the end had
found a passing reference to some problem with the plumbing in
Chapter 2. And that was it. So the guy dies. It just happens.
It wasn't even the climax of the book, because there wasn't
one. The character died about a third of the way through the
penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more
stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one
hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were
on Bartledan.
Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and
left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more
and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that
anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could
travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the
hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships,
eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at
spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul
ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.
The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen
is that it won't. That is not what `accident' means. The acci-
dent that eventually occurred was not what he had planned
at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered
horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy
simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an
uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer
atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.
The ship's systems protested all the way down that everything
was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a
final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and
finally exploded into a seething ball of flame it became clear that
this was not the case.
Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly
put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are
now required to do by law. For a short while afterwards, other
small fires flared up here and there as odd pieces of scattered
debris exploded quietly in their own time. Then they too died
away.
Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless inter-
stellar flight, was the only one on board who had actually
familiarised himself with the ship's safety procedures in case
of an unscheduled landing, and was therefore the sole survivor.
He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic
cocoon with `Have a nice day' printed in over three thousand
different languages all over it.
Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered
mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would
survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta.
After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he
became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.
12
Ford tumbled through the open air in a cloud of glass splinters
and chair parts. Again, he hadn't really thought things through,
really, and was just playing it by ear, buying time. At times of
major crisis he found it was often quite helpful to have his life
flash before his eyes. It gave him a chance to reflect on things,
him with a vital clue as to what to do next.
There was the ground rushing up to meet him at 30 feet
per second per second, but he would, he thought, deal with
that problem when he got to it. First things first.
Ah, here it came. His childhood. Hum drum stuff, he'd
been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on
Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes he knew all
that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain.
His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on,
come on.
He was twisting and turning downwards, the outside air at
this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.
Early voyages to other planets. Oh for Zark's sake, this
was like some sort of bloody travelogue documentary before
the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.
Ah!
Those were the days. They worked out of a hut on the
Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the
Danqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful
of highly sophisticated digital devices, and most importantly a
lot of dreams. No. Most importantly a lot of Fanallan rum. To
be completely accurate, that Ol' Janx Spirit was the absolute
most important thing, then the Fanallan rum, and also some of
the beaches on the Atoll where the local girls would hang out,
but the dreams were important as well. Whatever happened to
those?
He couldn't quite remember what the dreams were in fact,
but they had seemed immensely important at the time. They
had certainly not involved this huge towering office block he was
now falling down the side of. All of that had come when some of
the original team had started to settle down and get greedy, while
he and others had stayed out in the field, researching and hitch
hiking, and gradually becoming more and more isolated from the
corporate nightmare the Guide had inexorably turned into, and
the architectural monstrosity it had come to occupy. Where were
the dreams in that? He thought of all the corporate
lawyers who
occupied half of the building, all the `operatives' who occupied the
lower levels, and all the sub-editors and their secretaries and their
secretaries' lawyers and their secretaries' lawyers' secretaries, and
worst of all the accountants and the marketing department.
He had half a mind just to keep on falling. Two fingers
to the lot of them.
He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the
marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing
about what colour the Guide should be and exercising their
infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event. If any of
them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment they
would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping
past them to his certain death and flicking V-signs at them.
Sixteenth floor. Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that
copy of his they'd cut? Fifteen years of research he'd filed
from one planet alone and they'd cut it to two words. `Mostly
Harmless.' V-signs to them as well.
Fifteenth floor. Logistical Administration, whatever that was
about. They all had big cars. That, he thought, was what that
was about.
Fourteenth floor. Personnel. He had a very shrewd suspicion
that it was they who had engineered his fifteen-year exile while
the Guide metamorphosed into the corporate monolith (or
rather, duolith - mustn't forget the lawyers) it had become.
Thirteenth floor. Research and development.
Hang about.
Thirteenth floor.
He was having to think rather fast at the moment because