Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Hell’s donkeys,” muttered Zaphod as he and Ford attempted to sort through the tangle of wiring.

After a moment or so Ford told him to stand back. He tossed a coin into the teleport and jiggled a switch on the lolling control panel. With a crackle and spit of light, the coin vanished.

“That much of it works,” said Ford, “however, there is no guidance system. A matter transference teleport without guidance programming could put you… well, anywhere.”

The sun of Kakrafoon loomed huge on the screen.

“Who cares,” said Zaphod, “we go where we go.”

“And,” said Ford, “there is no autosystem. We couldn’t all go. Someone would have to stay and operate it.”

A solemn moment shuffled past. The sun loomed larger and larger.

“Hey, Marvin kid,” said Zaphod brightly, “how you doing?”

“Very badly I suspect,” muttered Marvin.

A shortish while later, the concert on Kakrafoon reached an unexpected climax.

The black ship with its single morose occupant had plunged on schedule into the nuclear furnace of the sun. Massive solar flares licked out from it millions of miles into space, thrilling and in a few cases spilling the dozen or so Flare Riders who had been coasting close to the surface of the sun in anticipation of the moment.

Moments before the flare light reached Kakrafoon the pounding desert cracked along a deep faultline. A huge and hitherto undetected underground river lying far beneath the surface gushed to the surface to be followed seconds later by the eruption of millions of tons of boiling lava that flowed hundreds of feet into the air, instantaneously vaporizing the river both above and below the surface in an explosion that echoed to the far side of the world and back again.

Those-very few-who witnessed the event and survived swear that the whole hundred thousand square miles of the desert rose into the air like a mile-thick pancake, flipped itself over and fell back down. At that precise moment the solar radiation from the flares filtered through the clouds of vaporized water and struck the ground.

A year later, the hundred thousand square mile desert was thick with flowers. The structure of the atmosphere around the planet was subtly altered. The sun blazed less harshly in the summer, the cold bit less bitterly in the winter, pleasant rain fell more often, and slowly the desert world of Kakrafoon became a paradise. Even the telepathic power with which the people of Kakrafoon had been cursed was permanently dispersed by the force of the explosion.

A spokesman for Disaster Area-the one who had had all the environmentalists shot-was later quoted as saying that it had been “a good gig".

Many people spoke movingly of the healing powers of music. A few sceptical scientists examined the records of the events more closely, and claimed that they had discovered faint vestiges of a vast artificially induced Improbability Field drifting in from a nearby region of space.

Arthur woke up and instantly regretted it. Hangovers he’d had, but never anything on this scale. This was it, this was the big one, this was the ultimate pits. Matter transference beams, he decided, were not as much fun as, say, a good solid kick in the head.

Being for the moment unwilling to move on account of a dull stomping throb he was experiencing, he lay a while and thought. The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth-when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass-the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another-particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the sub-ether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.

Many people had thought exactly this before Arthur Dent and had even gone to the lengths of writing songs about it. Here is one that used regularly to be chanted by huge crowds outside the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Teleport Systems factory on Happi-Werld III:

Aldebaran’s great, OK,

Algol’s pretty neat,

Betelgeuse’s pretty girls,

Will knock you off your feet.

They’ll do anything you like,

Real fast and then real slow,

But if you have to take me apart to get me there,

Then I don’t want to go.

Singing,

Take me apart, take me apart,

What a way to roam,

And if you have to take me apart to get me there,

I’d rather stay at home.

Sirius is paved with gold

So I’ve heard it said

By nuts who then go on to say

“See Tau before you’re dead.”

I’ll gladly take the high road

Or even take the low,

But if you have to take me apart to get me there,

Then I, for one, won’t go.

Singing,

Take me apart, take me apart, You must be off your head,

And if you try to take me apart to get me there,

I’ll stay right here in bed.

… and so on. Another favorite song was much shorter:

I teleported home one night,

With Ron and Sid and Meg,

Ron stole Meggie’s heart away,

And I got Sidney’s leg.

Arthur felt the waves of pain slowly receding, though he was still aware of a dull stomping throb. Slowly, carefully, he stood up.

“Can you hear a dull stomping throb?” said Ford Prefect.

Arthur span round and wobbled uncertainly. Ford Prefect was approaching looking red eyed and pasty.

“Where are we?” gasped Arthur.

Ford looked around. They were standing in a long curving corridor which stretched out of sight in both directions. The outer steel wall-which was painted in that sickly shade of pale green which they use in schools, hospitals and mental asylums to keep the inmates subdued-curved over the tops of their heads where it met the inner perpendicular wall which, oddly enough was covered in dark brown hessian wall weave. The floor was of dark green ribbed rubber.

Ford moved over to a very thick dark transparent panel set in the outer wall. It was several layers deep, yet through it he could see pinpoints of distant stars.

“I think we’re in a spaceship of some kind,” he said.

Down the corridor came the sound of a dull stomping throb.

“Trillian?” called Arthur nervously, “Zaphod?”

Ford shrugged.

“Nowhere about,” he said, “I’ve looked. They could be anywhere. An unprogrammed teleport can throw you light years in any direction. Judging by the way I feel I should think we’ve travelled a very long way indeed.”

“How do you feel?”

“Bad.”

“Do you think they’re…”

“Where they are, how they are, there’s no way we can know and no way we can do anything about it. Do what I do.”

“What?”

“Don’t think about it.”

Arthur turned this thought over in his mind, reluctantly saw the wisdom of it, tucked it up and put it away. He took a deep breath.

“Footsteps!” exclaimed Ford suddenly.

“Where?”

“That noise. That stomping throb. Pounding feet. Listen!”

Arthur listened. The noise echoed round the corridor at them from an indeterminate distance. It was the muffled sound of pounding footsteps, and it was noticeably louder.