The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (39 page)

Number Two stood before the Captain’s bathtub trembling with frustration.

“Don’t you want to interrogate the prisoners, sir?” he squealed.

The Captain peered at him in bemusement.

“Why on Golgafrincham should I want to do that?” he asked.

“To get information out of them, sir! To find out why they came here!”

“Oh no, no, no,” said the Captain. “I expect they just dropped in for a quick jynnan tonnyx, don’t you?”

“But, sir, they’re my prisoners! I must interrogate them!”

The Captain looked at them doubtfully.

“Oh all right,” he said, “if you must. Ask them what they want to drink.”

A hard cold gleam came into Number Two’s eyes. He advanced slowly on Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent.

“All right, you scum,” he growled, “you vermin …” He jabbed Ford with the Kill-O-Zap gun.

“Steady on, Number Two,” admonished the Captain gently.

“What do you want to drink?!!”
Number Two screamed.

“Well the jynnan tonnyx sounds very nice to me,” said Ford. “What about you, Arthur?”

Arthur blinked.

“What? Oh, er, yes,” he said.

“With ice or without?!”
bellowed Number Two.

“Oh, with, please,” said Ford.

“Lemon??!!”

“Yes, please,” said Ford, “and do you have any of those little biscuits? You know, the cheesey ones?”

“I’m asking the questions!!!!”
howled Number Two, his body quaking with apoplectic fury.

“Er, Number Two …” said the Captain softly.

“Sir?!”

“Shove off, would you, there’s a good chap. I’m trying to have a relaxing bath.”

Number Two’s eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression that you have lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unresolved problem.

He advanced on the Captain, his (Number Two’s) mouth a thin hard line. Again, tricky to know why this is understood as fighting behavior. If, while wandering through the jungle of Traal, you were suddenly to come
upon the fabled Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, you would have reason to be grateful if its mouth was a thin hard line rather than, as it usually is, a gaping mass of slavering fangs.

“May I remind you, sir,” hissed Number Two at the Captain, “that you have now been in that bath for over
three years?!”
This final shot delivered, Number Two spun on his heel and stalked off to a corner to practice darting eye movements in the mirror.

The Captain squirmed in his bath. He gave Ford Prefect a lame smile.

“Well, you need to relax a lot in a job like mine,” he said.

Ford slowly lowered his hands. It provoked no reaction. Arthur lowered his.

Treading very slowly and carefully, Ford moved over to the bath pedestal. He patted it.

“Nice,” he lied.

He wondered if it was safe to grin. Very slowly and carefully, he grinned. It was safe.

“Er …” he said to the Captain.

“Yes?” said the Captain.

“I wonder,” said Ford, “could I ask you actually what your job is in fact?”

A hand tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around.

It was the first officer. “Your drinks,” he said.

“Ah, thank you,” said Ford. He and Arthur took their jynnan tonnyx. Arthur sipped his, and was surprised to discover it tasted very like a whisky and soda.

“I mean, I couldn’t help noticing,” said Ford, also taking a sip, “the bodies. In the hold.”

“Bodies?” said the Captain in surprise.

Ford paused and thought to himself. Never take anything for granted, he thought. Could it be that the Captain doesn’t know he’s got fifteen million dead bodies on his ship?

The Captain was nodding cheerfully at him. He also appeared to be playing with a rubber duck.

Ford looked around. Number Two was staring at him in the mirror, but only for an instant: his eyes were constantly on the move. The first officer was just standing there holding the drinks tray and smiling benignly.

“Bodies?” said the Captain again.

Ford licked his lips.

“Yes,” he said, “all those dead telephone sanitizers and account executives, you know, down in the hold.”

The Captain stared at him. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.

“Oh, they’re not dead,” he said. “Good Lord, no, no, they’re frozen. They’re going to be revived.”

Ford did something he very rarely did. He blinked.

Arthur seemed to come out of a trance.

“You mean you’ve got a hold full of frozen hairdressers?” he said.

“Oh yes,” said the Captain. “Millions of them. Hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name it. We’re going to colonize another planet.”

Ford wobbled very slightly.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” said the Captain.

“What, with that lot?” said Arthur.

“Ah, now don’t misunderstand me,” said the Captain. “We’re just one of the ships in the Ark Fleet. We’re the ‘B’ Ark, you see. Sorry, could I just ask you to run a bit more hot water for me?”

Arthur obliged, and a cascade of pink frothy water swirled around the bath. The Captain let out a sigh of pleasure.

“Thank you so much, my dear fellow. Do help yourselves to more drinks of course.”

Ford tossed down his drink, took the bottle from the first officer’s tray and refilled his glass to the top.

“What,” he said, “is a ‘B’ Ark?”

“This is,” said the Captain, and swished the foamy water around joyfully with the duck.

“Yes,” said Ford, “but—”

“Well, what happened you see was,” said the Captain, “our planet, the world from which we have come, was, so to speak, doomed.”

“Doomed?”

“Oh yes. So what everyone thought was, let’s pack the whole population into some giant spaceships and go and settle on another planet.”

Having told this much of his story, he settled back with a satisfied grunt.

“You mean a less doomed one?” prompted Arthur.

“What did you say dear fellow?”

“A less doomed planet. You were going to settle on.”

“Are going to settle on, yes. So it was decided to build three ships, you
see, three Arks in Space, and … I’m not boring you, am I?”

“No, no,” said Ford firmly, “it’s fascinating.”

“You know it’s delightful,” reflected the Captain, “to have someone else to talk to for a change.”

Number Two’s eyes darted feverishly about the room again and then settled back on the mirror, like a pair of flies briefly distracted from their favorite piece of month-old meat.

“Trouble with a long journey like this,” continued the Captain, “is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you’re going to say next.”

“Only half the time?” asked Arthur in surprise.

The Captain thought for a moment.

“Yes, about half, I’d say. Anyway—where’s the soap?” He fished around and found it.

“Yes, so anyway,” he resumed, “the idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and then into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things; and then into the ‘B’ ship—that’s us—would go everyone else, the middlemen, you see.”

He smiled happily at them.

“And we were sent off first,” he concluded, and hummed a little bathing tune.

The little bathing tune, which had been composed for him by one of his world’s most exciting and prolific jingle writers (who was currently asleep in hold thirty-six some nine hundred yards behind them) covered what would otherwise have been an awkward moment of silence. Ford and Arthur shuffled their feet and furiously avoided each other’s eyes.

“Er …” said Arthur after a moment, “what exactly was it that was wrong with your planet then?”

“Oh, it was doomed, as I said,” said the Captain. “Apparently it was going to crash into the sun or something. Or maybe it was that the moon was going to crash into us. Something of the kind. Absolutely terrifying prospect whatever it was.”

“Oh,” said the first officer suddenly, “I thought it was that the planet was going to be invaded by a gigantic swarm of twelve-foot piranha bees. Wasn’t that it?”

Number Two spun around, eyes ablaze with a cold hard light that only comes with the amount of practice he was prepared to put in.

“That’s not what I was told!” he hissed. “My commanding officer told me that the entire planet was in imminent danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star goat!”

“Oh really …” said Ford Prefect.

“Yes! A monstrous creature from the pit of hell with scything teeth ten thousand miles long, breath that would boil oceans, claws that could tear continents from their roots, a thousand eyes that burned like the sun, slavering jaws a million miles across, a monster such as you have never … never … ever …”

“And they made sure they sent you lot off first, did they?” inquired Arthur.

“Oh yes,” said the Captain, “well, everyone said, very nicely I thought, that it was very important for morale to feel that they would be arriving on a planet where they could be sure of a good haircut and where the phones were clean.”

“Oh yes,” agreed Ford, “I can see that would be very important. And the other ships, er … they followed on after you, did they?”

For a moment the Captain did not answer. He twisted round in his bath and gazed backward over the huge bulk of the ship toward the bright galactic center. He squinted into the inconceivable distance.

“Ah. Well, it’s funny you should say that,” he said and allowed himself a slight frown at Ford Prefect, “because curiously enough we haven’t heard a peep out of them since we left five years ago.… But they must be behind us somewhere.”

He peered off into the distance again.

Ford peered with him and gave a thoughtful frown.

“Unless of course,” he said softly, “they were eaten by the goat.…”

“Ah yes …” said the Captain with a slight hesitancy creeping into his voice, “the goat.…” His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently at him. He stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word. He glanced at his first and second officers, but they seemed lost in their own thoughts for a moment. He glanced at Ford Prefect who raised his eyebrows at him.

“It’s a funny thing, you know,” said the Captain at last, “but now that I actually come to tell the story to someone else … I mean does it strike you as odd, Number One?”

“Errrrrrrrrrrr …” said Number One.

“Well,” said Ford, “I can see that you’ve got a lot of things you’re going
to want to talk about, so, thanks for the drinks, and if you could sort of drop us off at the nearest convenient planet …”

“Ah, well that’s a little difficult you see,” said the Captain, “because our trajectory thingy was preset before we left Golgafrincham, I think partly because I’m not very good with figures.…”

“You mean we’re stuck here on this ship?” exclaimed Ford, suddenly losing patience with the whole charade. “When are you meant to be reaching this planet you’re meant to be colonizing?”

“Oh, we’re nearly there I think,” said the Captain, “any second now. It’s probably time I was getting out of this bath in fact. Oh, I don’t know though, why stop just when I’m enjoying it?”

“So we’re actually going to land in a minute?” said Arthur.

“Well, not so much
land
, in fact, not actually land as such, no … er—”

“What are you talking about?” asked Ford sharply.

“Well,” said the Captain, picking his way through the words carefully, “I think as far as I can remember we were programmed to crash on it.”

“Crash?” shouted Ford and Arthur.

“Er, yes,” said the Captain, “yes, it’s all part of the plan, I think. There was a terribly good reason for it which I can’t quite remember at the moment. It was something to do with … er …”

Ford exploded.

“You’re a load of useless bloody loonies!” he shouted.

“Ah yes, that was it,” beamed the Captain, “that was the reason.”

T
he
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
has this to say about the planet of Golgafrincham:
It is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer her; a land of parched and barren landscapes, of sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle over its hot and dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musky lichens beneath; a land of fevered brows and intoxicated imaginings, particularly among those who taste the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts among those who have learned to forswear the lichens and find a tree to sit beneath; a land also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body and of the spirit. This was its history
.

And in all this ancient and mysterious history, the most mysterious figures of all were without doubt those of the Great Circling poets of Arium. These Circling Poets used to live in remote mountain passes where they would lie in wait for small bands of unwary travelers, circle around them, and throw rocks at them
.

And when the travelers cried out, saying why didn’t they go away and get on with writing some poems instead of pestering people with all this rock-throwing business, they would suddenly stop, and then break into one of the seven hundred and ninety-four great Song Cycles of Vassillian. These songs were all of extraordinary beauty, and even more extraordinary length, and all fell into exactly the same pattern
.

The first part of each song would tell how there once went forth from the City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished
.