The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (43 page)

“Oh … ah—” said the hairdresser with a sheepish look, which is recognized the whole Galaxy over as meaning “Er, will next Tuesday do?”

“All right,” said Ford, rounding on him. “What have you done? What are you going to do? What are your thoughts on fire development?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the hairdresser. “All they gave me was a couple of sticks.…”

“So what have you done with them?”

Nervously, the hairdresser fished in his track suit top and handed over the fruits of his labor to Ford.

Ford held them up for all to see.

“Curling tongs,” he said.

The crowd applauded.

“Never mind,” said Ford. “Rome wasn’t burned in a day.”

The crowd hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, but they loved it nevertheless. They applauded.

“Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course,” said the girl. “When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have you’ll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”

The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.

“Stick it up your nose,” he said.

“Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,” insisted the girl. “Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?”

“Do you?” Ford asked the crowd.

“Yes!” shouted some.

“No!” shouted others happily.

They didn’t know, they just thought it was great.

“And the wheel,” said the Captain, “what about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project.”

“Ah,” said the marketing girl, “well, we’re having a little difficulty there.”

“Difficulty?” exclaimed Ford. “Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It’s the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!”

The marketing girl soured him with a look.

“All right, Mr. Wiseguy,” she said, “you’re so clever, you tell us what color it should be.”

The crowd went wild. One up to the home team, they thought. Ford shrugged his shoulders and sat down again.

“Almighty Zarquon,” he said, “have none of you done anything?”

As if in answer to his question there was a sudden clamor of noise from the entrance to the clearing. The crowd couldn’t believe the amount of entertainment they were getting this afternoon: in marched a squad of about a dozen men dressed in the remnants of their Golgafrinchan 3rd Regiment dress uniforms. About half of them still carried Kill-O-Zap guns, the rest now carried spears which they struck together as they marched. They looked bronzed, healthy and utterly exhausted and bedraggled. They clattered to a halt and banged to attention. One of them fell over and never moved again.

“Captain, sir!” cried Number Two—for he was their leader—“Permission to report, sir!”

“Yes, Number Two, welcome back and all that. Find any hot springs?” said the Captain despondently.

“No, sir!”

“Thought you wouldn’t.”

Number Two strode through the crowd and presented arms before the bath.

“We have discovered another continent!”

“When was this?”

“It lies across the sea …” said Number Two, narrowing his eyes significantly, “to the east!”

“Ah.”

Number Two turned to face the crowd. He raised his gun above his
head. This is going to be great, thought the crowd.

“We have declared war on it!”

Wild abandoned cheering broke out in all corners of the clearing—this was beyond all expectation.

“Wait a minute,” shouted Ford Prefect. “Wait a minute!”

He leaped to his feet and demanded silence. After a while he got it, or at least the best silence he could hope for under the circumstances: the circumstances were that the bagpiper was spontaneously composing a national anthem.

“Do we have to have the piper?” demanded Ford.

“Oh yes,” said the Captain, “we’ve given him a grant.”

Ford considered opening this idea up for debate but quickly decided that that way madness lay. Instead he slung a well judged rock at the piper and turned to face Number Two.

“War?” he said.

“Yes!” Number Two gazed contemptuously at Ford Prefect.

“On the next continent?”

“Yes! Total warfare! The war to end all wars!”

“But there’s no one even living there yet!”

Ah, interesting, thought the crowd, nice point.

Number Two’s gaze hovered undisturbed. In this respect his eyes were like a couple of mosquitos that hover purposefully three inches from your nose and refuse to be deflected by arm thrashes, fly swats or rolled newspapers.

“I know that,” he said, “but there will be one day! So we have left an open-ended ultimatum.”

“What?”

“And blown up a few military installations.”

The Captain leaned forward out of his bath.

“Military installations, Number Two?” he said.

For a moment the eyes wavered.

“Yes, sir, well potential military installations. All right … trees.”

The moment of uncertainty passed—his eyes flicked like whips over his audience.

“And,” he roared, “we interrogated a gazelle!”

He flipped his Kill-O-Zap smartly under his arm and marched off through the pandemonium that had now erupted throughout the ecstatic crowd. A few steps was all he managed before he was caught up and carried shoulder high for a lap of honor around the clearing.

Ford sat and idly tapped a couple of stones together.

“So what else have you done?” he inquired after the celebrations had died down.

“We have started a culture,” said the marketing girl.

“Oh yes?” said Ford.

“Yes. One of our film producers is already making a fascinating documentary about the indigenous cavemen of the area.”

“They’re not cavemen.”

“They look like cavemen.”

“Do they live in caves?”

“Well …”

“They live in huts.”

“Perhaps they’re having their caves redecorated,” called out a wag from the crowd.

Ford rounded on him angrily.

“Very funny,” he said, “but have you noticed that they’re dying out?”

On their journey back, Ford and Arthur had come across two derelict villages and the bodies of many natives in the woods, where they had crept away to die. Those that still lived seemed stricken and listless, as if they were suffering from some disease of the spirit rather than the body. They moved sluggishly and with an infinite sadness. Their future had been taken away from them.

“Dying out!” repeated Ford. “Do you know what that means?”

“Er … we shouldn’t sell them any life insurance?” called out the wag again.

Ford ignored him, and appealed to the whole crowd.

“Can you try and understand,” he said, “that it’s just since we’ve arrived here that they’ve started dying out!”

“In fact that comes over terribly well in this film,” said the marketing girl, “and just gives it that poignant twist which is the hallmark of the really great documentary. The producer’s very committed.”

“He should be,” muttered Ford.

“I gather,” said the girl, turning to address the Captain who was beginning to nod off, “that he wants to make one about you next, Captain.”

“Oh really?” he said, coming to with a start. “That’s awfully nice.”

“He’s got a very strong angle on it, you know, the burden of responsibility, the loneliness of command.…”

The Captain hummed and hahed about this for a moment.

“Well, I wouldn’t overstress that angle, you know,” he said finally. “One’s never alone with a rubber duck.”

He held the duck aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.

All this while, the management consultant had been sitting in stony silence, his fingertips pressed to his temples to indicate that he was waiting and would wait all day if it was necessary.

At this point he decided he would not wait all day after all, he would merely pretend that the last half hour hadn’t happened.

He rose to his feet.

“If,” he said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy …”

“Fiscal policy!” whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!”

The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied.

“Fiscal policy …” he repeated, “that is what I said.”

“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn’t grow on trees you know.”

“If you would allow me to continue …” Ford nodded dejectedly.

“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”

Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.

“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.”

Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.

“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and … er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”

The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn.

“You’re all mad,” explained Ford Prefect.

“You’re absolutely barmy,” he suggested.

“You’re a bunch of raving nutters,” he opined.

The tide of opinion was beginning to turn against him. What had started out as excellent entertainment had now, in the crowd’s view, deteriorated into mere abuse, and since this abuse was in the main directed at them they wearied of it.

Sensing this shift in the wind, the marketing girl turned on him.

“Is it perhaps in order,” she demanded, “to inquire what you’ve been doing all these months then? You and that other interloper have been missing since the day we arrived.”

“We’ve been on a journey,” said Ford. “We went to try and find out something about this planet.”

“Oh,” said the girl archly, “doesn’t sound very productive to me.”

“No? Well, have I got news for you, my love. We have discovered this planet’s future.”

Ford waited for this statement to have its effect. It didn’t have any. They didn’t know what he was talking about.

He continued.

“It doesn’t matter a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys what you all choose to do from now on. Burn down the forests, anything, it won’t make a scrap of difference. Your future history has already happened. Two million years you’ve got and that’s it. At the end of that time your race will be dead, gone and good riddance to you. Remember that, two million years!”

The crowd muttered to itself in annoyance. People as rich as they had suddenly become shouldn’t be obliged to listen to this sort of gibberish. Perhaps they could tip the fellow a leaf or two and he would go away.

They didn’t need to bother. Ford was already stalking out of the clearing, pausing only to shake his head at Number Two who was already firing his Kill-O-Zap into some neighboring trees.

He turned back once.

“Two million years!” he said and laughed.

“Well,” said the Captain with a soothing smile, “still time for a few more baths. Could someone pass me the sponge? I just dropped it over the side.”

A
mile or so away through the wood, Arthur Dent was too busily engrossed with what he was doing to hear Ford Prefect approach.

What he was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on a wide flat piece of rock he had scratched out the shape of a large square, subdivided into one hundred and sixty-nine smaller squares, thirteen to a side.

Furthermore he had collected together a pile of smallish flattish stones and scratched the shape of a letter on to each. Sitting morosely around the rock were a couple of the surviving local native men to whom Arthur Dent was trying to introduce the curious concept embodied in these stones.

So far they had not done well. They had attempted to eat some of them, bury others and throw the rest of them away. Arthur had finally encouraged one of them to lay a couple of stones on the board he had scratched out, which was not even as far as he’d managed to get the day before. Along with the rapid deterioration in the morale of these creatures, there seemed to be a corresponding deterioration in their actual intelligence.

In an attempt to egg them along, Arthur set out a number of letters on the board himself, and then tried to encourage the natives to add some more themselves.

It was not going well.

Ford watched quietly from beside a nearby tree.

“No,” said Arthur to one of the natives who had just shuffled some of the letters round in a fit of abysmal dejection, “Q scores ten you see, and it’s on a triple word score, so … look, I’ve explained the rules to you … no, no, look please, put down that jawbone … All right, we’ll start again. And try to concentrate this time.”

Ford leaned his elbow against the tree and his hand against his head.

“What are you doing, Arthur?” he asked quietly.

Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a feeling that all this might look slightly foolish. All he knew was that it had worked like a dream on him when he was a child. But things were different then, or rather would be.

“I’m trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble,” he said.

“They’re not cavemen,” said Ford.

“They look like cavemen.”

Ford let it pass.

“I see,” he said.

“It’s uphill work,” said Arthur wearily. “The only word they know is
grunt
and they can’t spell it.”

He sighed and sat back.

“What’s that supposed to achieve?” asked Ford.