The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (8 page)

“Well,” said Ford, “the Thumb’s an electronic sub-etha signaling device, the roundabout’s at Barnard’s Star six light-years away, but otherwise, that’s more or less right.”

“And the bug-eyed monster?”

“Is green, yes.”

“Fine,” said Arthur, “when can I go home?”

“You can’t,” said Ford Prefect, and found the light switch.

“Shade your eyes …” he said, and turned it on.

Even Ford was surprised.

“Good grief,” said Arthur, “is this really the interior of a flying saucer?”

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz heaved his unpleasant green body round the control bridge. He always felt vaguely irritable after demolishing populated planets. He wished that someone would come and tell him that it was all wrong so that he could shout at them and feel better. He flopped as heavily as he could onto his control seat in the hope that it would break and give him something to be genuinely angry about, but it only gave a complaining sort of creak.

“Go away!” he shouted at a young Vogon guard who entered the bridge at that moment. The guard vanished immediately, feeling rather relieved. He was glad it wouldn’t now be him who delivered the report they’d just received. The report was an official release which said that a wonderful new form of spaceship drive was at this moment being unveiled at a Government research base on Damogran which would henceforth make all hyperspatial express routes unnecessary.

Another door slid open, but this time the Vogon captain didn’t shout because it was the door from the galley quarters where the Dentrassis prepared his meals. A meal would be most welcome.

A huge furry creature bounded through the door with his lunch tray. It was grinning like a maniac.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was delighted. He knew that when a Dentrassi looked that pleased with itself there was something going on somewhere on the ship that he could get very angry indeed about.

Ford and Arthur stared around them.

“Well, what do you think?” said Ford.

“It’s a bit squalid, isn’t it?”

Ford frowned at the grubby mattresses, unwashed cups and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear that lay around the cramped cabin.

“Well, this is a working ship, you see,” said Ford. “These are the Dentrassis’ sleeping quarters.”

“I thought you said they were called Vogons or something.”

“Yes,” said Ford, “the Vogons run the ship, the Dentrassis are the cooks; they let us on board.”

“I’m confused,” said Arthur.

“Here, have a look at this,” said Ford. He sat down on one of the mattresses and rummaged about in his satchel. Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.

Ford handed the book to Arthur.

“What is it?” asked Arthur.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. It’s a sort of electronic book. It tells you everything you need to know about anything. That’s its job.”

Arthur turned it over nervously in his hands.

“I like the cover,” he said. “ ‘Don’t Panic’ It’s the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody’s said to me all day.”

“I’ll show you how it works,” said Ford. He snatched it from Arthur, who was still holding it as if it were a two-week-dead lark, and pulled it out of its cover.

“You press this button here, you see, and the screen lights up, giving you the index.”

A screen, about three inches by four, lit up and characters began to flicker across the surface.

“You want to know about Vogons, so I entered that name so.” His fingers tapped some more keys. “And there we are.”

The words
Vogon Constructor Fleets
flared in green across the screen.

Ford pressed a large red button at the bottom of the screen and words began to undulate across it. At the same time, the book began to speak the entry as well in a still, quiet, measured voice. This is what the book said:

“Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy—not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters
.

“The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
.

“On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.”

Arthur blinked at it.

“What a strange book. How did we get a lift then?”

“That’s the point, it’s out of date now,” said Ford, sliding the book back into its cover. “I’m doing the field research for the new revised edition, and one of the things I’ll have to do is include a bit about how the Vogons now employ Dentrassi cooks, which gives us a rather useful little loophole.”

A pained expression crossed Arthur’s face. “But who are the Dentrassis?” he said.

“Great guys,” said Ford. “They’re
the
best cooks and the best drink mixers and they don’t give a wet slap about anything else. And they’ll always help hitchhikers aboard, partly because they like the company, but mostly because it annoys the Vogons. Which is exactly the sort of thing you need to know if you’re an impoverished hitchhiker trying to see the marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day. And that’s my job. Fun, isn’t it?”

Arthur looked lost.

“It’s amazing,” he said, and frowned at one of the other mattresses.

“Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I intended,” said Ford. “I came for a week and got stuck for fifteen years.”

“But how did you get there in the first place then?”

“Easy, I got a lift with a teaser.”

“A teaser?”

“Yeah.”

“Er, what is …”

“A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”

“Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.

“Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making
beep beep
noises. Rather childish really.” Ford leaned back on the mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself.

“Ford,” insisted Arthur, “I don’t know if this sounds like a silly question, but what am I doing here?”

“Well, you know that,” said Ford, “I rescued you from the Earth.”

“And what’s happened to the Earth?”

“Ah. It’s been demolished.”

“Has it,” said Arthur levelly.

“Yes. It just boiled away into space.”

“Look,” said Arthur, “I’m a bit upsest about that.”

Ford frowned to himself and seemed to roll the thought around his mind.

“Yes, I can understand that,” he said at last.

“Understand that!” shouted Arthur. “Understand that!”

Ford sprang up.

“Keep looking at the book!” he hissed urgently.

“What?”

“Don’t Panic.”

“I’m not panicking!”

“Yes, you are.”

“All right, so I’m panicking, what else is there to do?”

“You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy’s a fun place. You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Arthur, rather politely he thought.

Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it. Arthur blinked at him. He wished there was something simple and recognizable he could grasp hold of. He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrassis’ underwear, the piles of Sqornshellous mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of
cornflakes. But he couldn’t, and he didn’t feel safe.

Suddenly a violent noise leaped at them from no source that he could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves.

“Shush!” said Ford. “Listen, it might be important.”

“Im … important?”

“It’s the Vogon captain making an announcement on the tannoy.”

“You mean that’s how the Vogons talk?”

“Listen!”

“But I can’t speak Vogon!”

“You don’t need to. Just put this fish in your ear.”

Ford, with a lightning movement, clapped his hand to Arthur’s ear, and he had the sudden sickening sensation of the fish slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror he scrabbled at his ear for a second or so, but then slowly turned goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses.

He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only now it had somehow taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English.

This is what he heard …

H
owl bowl gargle bowl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh
should have a good time. Message repeats. This is your captain speaking, so stop whatever you’re doing and pay attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a couple of hitchhikers aboard. Hello, wherever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I worked hard to get where I am today, and I didn’t become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a search party, and as soon as they find you I will put you off the ship. If you’re very lucky I might read you some of my poetry first.

“Secondly, we are about to jump into hyperspace for the journey to Barnard’s Star. On arrival we will stay in dock for a seventy-two-hour refit, and no one’s to leave the ship during that time. I repeat, all planet leave is canceled. I’ve just had an unhappy love affair, so I don’t see why anybody else should have a good time. Message ends.”

The noise stopped.

Arthur discovered to his embarrassment that he was lying curled up in a small ball on the floor with his arms wrapped round his head. He smiled weakly.

“Charming man,” he said. “I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one …”

“You wouldn’t need to,” said Ford. “They’ve got as much sex appeal as a road accident. No, don’t move,” he added as Arthur began to uncurl himself, “you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“You ask a glass of water.”

Arthur thought about this.

“Ford,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“What’s this fish doing in my ear?”

“It’s translating for you. It’s a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like.”

He tossed over
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and then curled himself up into a fetal ball to prepare himself for the jump.

At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthur’s mind.

His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top of his head.

The room folded flat around him, spun around, shifted out of existence and left him sliding into his own navel.

They were passing through hyperspace.

“The Babel fish,”
said
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
quietly,
“is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then exactes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish
.

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God
.