The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (59 page)

Ten minutes later, drifting idly through a cloud, he got a large and extremely disreputable cocktail party in the small of the back.

T
he longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow-up. The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don’t have any particular need to believe it, then don’t go and look because you won’t enjoy it.

There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over the thing like vultures, but you shouldn’t believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one.

One of the problems, and it’s one that is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn’t leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and recessive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots or, more and more frequently, both.

Either way, it means that, genetically speaking, each succeeding generation is now less likely to leave than the preceding one.

So, other factors come into operation, like when the drinks are going to run out.

Now, because of certain things that have happened that seemed like a good idea at the time (and one of the problems with a party that never stops is that all the things that only seem like a good idea at parties continue to seem like good ideas), that point seems still to be a long way off.

One of the things that seemed like a good idea at the time was that the party should fly—not in the normal sense that parties are meant to fly, but literally.

One night, long ago, a band of drunken astro-engineers of the first generation clambered around the building digging this, fixing that, banging very hard on the other, and when the sun rose the following morning, it
was startled to find itself shining on a building full of happy drunken people that was now floating like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.

Not only that, but the flying party had also managed to arm itself rather heavily. If they were going to get involved in any petty arguments with wine merchants, they wanted to make sure they had might on their side.

The transition from full-time cocktail party to part-time raiding party came with ease, and did much to add that extra bit of zest and swing to the whole affair that was badly needed at this point because of the enormous number of times that the band had already played all the numbers it knew over the years.

They looted, they raided, they held whole cities to ransom for fresh supplies of cheese, crackers, guacamole, spareribs and wine and spirits that would now get piped aboard from floating tankers.

The problem of when the drinks are going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day.

The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it.

It is in bad shape.

The party has attacked and raided an awful lot of it, and no one has ever succeeded in hitting it back because of the erratic and unpredictable way in which it lurches round the sky.

It is one hell of a party.

It is also one hell of a thing to get hit with in the small of the back.

A
rthur lay floundering in pain on a piece of ripped and dismembered reinforced concrete, flicked at by wisps of passing cloud and confused by the sounds of flabby merrymaking somewhere indistinctly behind him.

There was a sound he couldn’t immediately identify, partly because he didn’t know the tune “I Left My Leg in Jaglan Beta” and partly because the band playing it was very tired, and some members of it were playing in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed πr
²
each according to the amount of sleep he’d managed to grab recently.

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting. He seemed to have sprained his wrist. His back, too, was hurting, but he soon satisfied himself that he was not badly hurt, but just bruised and a little shaken, as who wouldn’t be. He couldn’t understand what a building would be doing flying through the clouds.

On the other hand, he would have been a little hard pressed to come up with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so he decided that he and the building were just going to have to accept each other. He looked up from where he was lying. A wall of pale but stained stone slabs rose up behind him, the building proper. He seemed to be stretched out on some sort of ledge or lip that extended outward for about three or four feet all the way around. It was a hunk of the ground in which the party building had had its foundations, and which it had taken along with itself to keep itself bound together at the bottom end.

Nervously, he stood up and suddenly, looking out over the edge, he felt nauseous with vertigo. He pressed himself back against the wall, wet with mist and sweat. His head was swimming freestyle, but his stomach was doing the butterfly.

Even though he had got up here under his own power, he could now not even bear to contemplate the hideous drop in front of him. He was not about to try his luck jumping. He was not about to move an inch closer to the edge.

Clutching his tote bag he edged along the wall, hoping to find a
doorway in. The solid weight of the can of olive oil was a great reassurance to him.

He was edging in the direction of the nearest corner, in the hope that the wall around the corner might offer more in the way of entrances than this one, which offered none.

The unsteadiness of the building’s flight made him feel sick with fear, and, after a short time, he took the towel from out of his bag, and did something with it which once again justified its supreme position in the list of useful things to take with you when you hitchhike round the Galaxy—he put it over his head so he wouldn’t have to see what he was doing.

His feet edged along the ground. His outstretched hand edged along the wall.

Finally he came to the corner, and as his hand rounded the corner, it encountered something that gave him such a shock he nearly fell off. It was another hand.

The two hands gripped each other.

He desperately wanted to use his other hand to pull the towel away from his eyes, but it was holding the bag with the olive oil, the retsina and the postcards of Santorini, and he very much didn’t want to put it down.

He experienced one of those “self” moments, one of those moments when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think “Who am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?” He whimpered very slightly.

He tried to free his hand, but he couldn’t. The other hand was holding his tightly. He had no recourse but to edge onward toward the corner. He leaned around it and shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the towel. This seemed to provoke a sharp cry of some unfathomable emotion from the owner of the other hand.

The towel was whipped from his head and he found his eyes peering into those of Ford Prefect. Beyond him stood Slartibartfast, and beyond them he could clearly see a porchway and a large closed door.

They were both pressed back against the wall, eyes wild with terror as they stared out into the thick blind cloud around them, and tried to resist the lurching and swaying of the building.

“Where the zarking photon have you been?” hissed Ford, panic-stricken.

“Er, well,” stuttered Arthur, not really knowing how to sum it all up that briefly, “here and there. What are you doing here?”

Ford turned his wild eyes on Arthur again.

“They won’t let us in without a bottle,” he hissed.

T
he first thing Arthur noticed as they entered into the thick of the party, apart from the noise, the suffocating heat, the wild profusion of colors that protruded dimly through the atmosphere of heady smoke, the carpets thick with ground glass, ash and guacamole droppings, and the small group of pterodactyl-like creatures in Lurex who descended on his cherished bottle of retsina, squawking, “A new pleasure, a new pleasure,” was Trillian being chatted up by a Thunder God.

“Didn’t I see you at Milliways?” he was saying.

“Were you the one with the hammer?”

“Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more fraught.”

Squeals of some hideous pleasure rang around the room, the outer dimensions of which were invisible through the heaving throng of happy noisy creatures, cheerfully yelling at each other things that nobody could hear and occasionally having crises.

“Seems fun,” said Trillian. “What did you say, Arthur?”

“I said, how the hell did you get here?”

“I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe. Have you met Thor? He makes thunder.”

“Hello,” said Arthur. “I expect that must be very interesting.”

“Hi,” said Thor, “it is. Have you got a drink?”

“Er, no actually.…”

“Then why don’t you go and get one?”

“See you later, Arthur,” said Trillian.

Something jogged Arthur’s mind, and he looked around huntedly.

“Zaphod isn’t here, is he?” he said.

“See you,” said Trillian firmly, “later.”

Thor glared at him with hard coal-black eyes, his beard bristling. What little light there was in the place mustered its forces briefly to glint menacingly off the horns on his helmet.

He took Trillian’s elbow in his extremely large hand and the muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of Volkswagens parking.

He led her away.

“One of the interesting things about being immortal,” he said, “is …”

“One of the interesting things about space,” Arthur heard Slartibartfast saying to a large and voluminous creature who looked like someone losing a fight with a pink comforter and was gazing raptly at the old man’s deep eyes and silver beard, “is how dull it is.”

“Dull?” said the creature, and blinked her rather wrinkled and bloodshot eyes.

“Yes,” said Slartibartfast, “staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there’s so much of it and so little in it. Would you like me to quote you some statistics?”

“Er, well …”

“Please, I would like to. They, too, are quite sensationally dull.”

“I’ll come back and hear them in a moment,” she said, patted him on the arm, lifted up her skirts like a Hovercraft and moved off into the heaving crowd.

“I thought she’d never go,” growled the old man. “Come, Earthman.…”

“Arthur.”

“We must find the Silver Bail, it is here somewhere.”

“Can’t we just relax a little,” Arthur said. “I’ve had a tough day. Trillian’s here, incidentally, she didn’t say how; it probably doesn’t matter.”

“Think of the danger to the Universe.…”

“The Universe,” said Arthur, “is big enough and old enough to look after itself for half an hour. All right,” he added, in response to Slartibartfast’s increasing agitation, “I’ll wander round and see if anybody’s seen it.”

“Good, good,” said Slartibartfast, “good.” He plunged into the crowd himself, and was told to relax by everybody he passed.

“Have you seen a bail anywhere?” said Arthur to a little man who seemed to be standing eagerly waiting to listen to somebody. “It’s made of silver, vitally important for the future safety of the Universe, and about this long.”

“No,” said the enthusiastically wizened little man, “but do have a drink and tell me all about it.”

Ford Prefect writhed past, dancing a wild, frenetic and not entirely unobscene dance with someone who looked as if she were wearing Sydney Opera House on her head. He was yelling a futile conversation at her above the din
“I like the hat!” he bawled.

“What?”

“I said, I like the hat.”

“I’m not wearing a hat.”

“Well, I like the head, then.”

“What?”

“I said, I like the head. Interesting bone structure.”

“What?”

Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of other movements he was performing.

“I said you dance great,” he shouted, “just don’t nod so much.”

“What?”

“It’s just that every time you nod,” said Ford, “ … ow!” he added as his partner nodded forward to say “What?” and once again pecked him sharply on the forehead with the sharp end of her swept-forward skull.

“My planet was blown up one morning,” said Arthur, who had found himself quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story, or at least, edited highlights of it, “that’s why I’m dressed like this, in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see. I didn’t realize I’d be coming to a party.”

The little man nodded enthusiastically.

“Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing gown. Rather than the spacesuit one would normally expect. Shortly after that I discovered that my planet had originally been built for a bunch of mice. You can imagine how I felt about that. I was then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I have been blown up ridiculously often, shot at, insulted, regularly disintegrated, deprived of tea and recently I crashed into a swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave.”

“Ah,” effervesced the little man, “and did you have a wonderful time?”

Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.

“What a wonderfully exciting cough,” said the little man, quite startled by it, “do you mind if I join you?”

And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of coughing that caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused. Together they performed a lung-busting duet that went on for fully two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt.