Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Look, Earthman,” he said angrily, “you’ve got a job to do, right? The Question to the Ultimate Answer, right?”

“What, that thing?” said Arthur, “I thought we’d forgotten about that.”

“Not me, baby. Like the mice said, it’s worth a lot of money in the right quarters. And it’s all locked up in that head thing of yours.”

“Yes but…”

“But nothing! Think about it. The Meaning of Life! We get our fingers on that we can hold every shrink in the Galaxy up to ransom, and that’s worth a bundle. I owe mine a mint.”

Arthur took a deep breath without much enthusiasm.

“Alright,” he said, “but where do we start? How should I know? They say the Ultimate Answer or whatever is Forty-two, how am I supposed to know what the question is? It could be anything. I mean, what’s six times seven?”

Zaphod looked at him hard for a moment. Then his eyes blazed with excitement.

“Forty-two!” he cried.

Arthur wiped his palm across his forehead.

“Yes,” he said patiently,” I know that.”

Zaphod’s faces fell.

“I’m just saying that the question could be anything at all,” said Arthur, “and I don’t see how I am meant to know.”

“Because,” hissed Zaphod, “you were there when your planet did the big firework.”

“We have a thing on Earth…” began Arthur.

“Had,” corrected Zaphod.

“… called tact. Oh never mind. Look, I just don’t know.”

A low voice echoed dully round the cabin.

“I know,” said Marvin.

Ford called out from the controls he was still fighting a losing battle with.

“Stay out of this Marvin,” he said, “this is organism talk.”

“It’s printed in the Earthman’s brainwave patterns,” continued Marvin, “but I don’t suppose you’ll be very interested in knowing that.”

“You mean,” said Arthur, “you mean you can see into my mind?”

“Yes,” said Marvin.

Arthur stared in astonishment.

“And…?” he said.

“It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small.”

“Ah,” said Arthur, “abuse.”

“Yes,” confirmed Marvin.

“Ah, ignore him,” said Zaphod, “he’s only making it up.”

“Making it up?” said Marvin, swivelling his head in a parody of astonishment, “Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

“Marvin,” said Trillian in the gentle, kindly voice that only she was still capable of assuming in talking to this misbegotten creature, “if you knew all along, why then didn’t you tell us?”

Marvin’s head swivelled back to her.

“You didn’t ask,” he said simply.

“Well, we’re asking you now, metal man,” said Ford, turning round to look at him.

At that moment the ship suddenly stopped rocking and swaying, the engine pitch settled down to a gentle hum.

“Hey, Ford,” said Zaphod, “that sounds good. Have you worked out the controls of this boat?”

“No,” said Ford, “I just stopped fiddling with them. I reckon we just go to wherever this ship is going and get off it fast.”

“Yeah, right,” said Zaphod.

“I could tell you weren’t really interested,” murmured Marvin to himself and slumped into a corner and switched himself off.

“Trouble is,” said Ford, “that the one instrument in this while ship that is giving any reading is worrying me. If it is what I think it is, and if it’s saying what I think it’s saying, then we’ve already gone too far back into the past. Maybe as much as two million years before our own time.”

Zaphod shrugged.

“Time is bunk,” he said.

“I wonder who this ship belongs to anyway,” said Arthur.

“Me,” said Zaphod.

“No. Who it really belongs to.”

“Really me,” insisted Zaphod, “look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, OK?”

“Tell the ship that,” said Arthur.

Zaphod strode over to the console.

“Ship,” he said, banging on the panels, “this is your new owner speaking to…”

He got no further. Several things happened at once.

The ship dropped out of time travel mode and re-emerged into real space.

All the controls on the console, which had been shut down for the time trip now lit up.

A large vision screen above the console winked into life revealing a wide starscape and a single very large sun dead ahead of them.

None of these things, however, were responsible for the fact that Zaphod was at the same moment hurled bodily backwards against the rear of the cabin, as were all the others.

They were hurled back by a single thunderous clap of noise that thuddered out of the monitor speakers surrounding the vision screen.

Down on the dry, red world of Kakrafoon, in the middle of the vast Rudlit Desert, the stage technicians were testing the sound system.

That is to say, the sound system was in the desert, not the stage technicians. They had retreated to the safety of Disaster Area’s giant control ship which hung in orbit some four hundred miles above the surface of the planet, and they were testing the sound system from there. Anyone within five miles of the speaker silos wouldn’t have survived the tuning up.

If Arthur Dent had been within five miles of the speaker silos then his expiring thought would have been that in both size and shape the sound rig closely resembled Manhattan. Risen out of the silos, the neutron phase speaker stacks towered monstrously against the sky, obscuring the banks of plutonium reactors and seismic amps behind them.

Buried deep in concrete bunkers beneath the city of speakers lay the instruments that the musicians would control from their ship, the massive photon-ajuitar, the bass detonator and the Megabang drum complex.

It was going to be a noisy show.

Aboard the giant control ship, all was activity and bustle. Hotblack Desiato’s limoship, a mere tadpole beside it, had arrived and docked, and the lamented gentleman was being transported down the high vaulted corridors to meet the medium who was going to interpret his psychic impulses on to the ajuitar keyboard.

A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn’t a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.

Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.

The band’s manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymbalistics would be right.

The sub-ether was buzzing with the communications of the stage technicians testing the speaker channels, and this it was that was being relayed to the interior of the black ship.

Its dazed occupants lay against the back wall of the cabin, and listened to the voices on the monitor speakers.

“OK, channel nine on power,” said a voice, “testing channel fifteen…”

Another thumping crack of noise walloped through the ship.

“Channel fifteen AOK,” said another voice.

A third voice cut in.

“The black stunt ship is now in position,” it said, “it’s looking good. Gonna be a great sundive. Stage computer on line?”

A computer voice answered.