Kitabı oku: «The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Руководство для путешествующих автостопом по Галактике», sayfa 2

Chapter 3

On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere⁴² many miles above the surface of the planet located near star Sol⁴³; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow somethings, huge as office buildings, silent as birds. They moved easily, taking their time⁴⁴, grouping, preparing. The planet beneath them didn’t know of their presence, which was just how they wanted it to be. The huge yellow somethings went unnoticed even over Cape Canaveral⁴⁵.

The only place they registered was on a small black device called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which blinked quietly. It lay in the darkness inside Ford Prefect’s leather backpack. The contents of his bag were quite interesting, in fact, and would have made any Earth physicist’s eyes pop out of his head. Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic he had an Electronic Thumb – a short black rod, smooth, with a couple of switches at one end; he also had a device which looked like a large electronic calculator. This had about a hundred small buttons and a screen on which any of a million “pages” could immediately appear. It looked very complicated, and this was one of the reasons why its plastic cover had the words Don’t Panic on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable book that ever came out of the great publishing house of Ursa Minor – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would need several very large buildings to carry it in.

Besides that, in Ford Prefect’s bag there were a few pens, a notepad, and a large bath towel from Marks & Spencer⁴⁶.

* * *

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is the most useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly because it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you travel across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant sandy beaches of Santraginus V; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow river Moth; wet it for use in fighting; wrap it round your head to avoid the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a stupid animal, it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal⁴⁷, and of course dry yourself with it if it’s still clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has great psychological value. For some reason, if a non-hitchhiker (a strag) sees that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically think that he also has a toothbrush, soap, tin of biscuits, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather clothes, space suit etc., etc. Then the strag will happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the Galaxy and still know where his towel is is clearly a remarkable man. Thus there’s a phrase which has got into hitchhiking slang: “Hey, you know Ford Prefect? That’s a guy who really knows where his towel is.”

* * *

Lying quietly on top of the towel in Ford Prefect’s backpack, the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began to blink more quickly. Miles above the surface of the planet the huge yellow somethings began to spread out.

“You got a towel with you?” said Ford Prefect suddenly to Arthur.

Arthur, struggling through his third pint, looked round at him. “Why? No. Should I have?” He had given up being surprised any longer.

Ford clicked his tongue in irritation. “Drink up⁴⁸,” he said.

At that moment the dull sound of a crash from outside was heard over the low hum of the pub, over the sound of the jukebox, over the sound of the man next to Ford drinking the whisky Ford had eventually bought him.

Arthur jumped to his feet. “What’s that?” he yelled.

“Don’t worry,” said Ford, “they haven’t started yet.”

“Thank God for that,” said Arthur and relaxed.

“It’s probably just your house being knocked down,” said Ford, finishing his last pint.

“What?” shouted Arthur. Suddenly Ford’s spell was broken. Arthur looked wildly around him and ran to the window.

“My God, they are! They’re knocking my house down. What the hell am I doing in the pub, Ford?”

“It hardly makes any difference at this stage,” said Ford, “let them have their fun.”

“Fun?” yelled Arthur. “Fun?” He quickly looked out of the window again to check if they were talking about the same thing. “Damn their fun!” he shouted and ran out of the pub angrily waving an almost empty beer glass. He made no friends at all in the pub that lunchtime.

“Stop, you vandals!” yelled Arthur. “Stop!”

Ford had to go after him. Turning quickly to the barman he asked for four packets of peanuts.

“There you are, sir,” said the barman, putting the packets on the bar, “twenty-eight pence if you’d be so kind.”

Ford was very kind – he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he had a momentary sensation which he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever had it before.

In moments of great stress, every life form gives out a tiny signal. This signal simply means how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too tiny to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.

For a moment the barman was hit by a shocking sensation of distance. He didn’t know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with respect.

“Are you serious, sir?” he said in a small whisper that made the whole pub silent. “You think the world’s going to end?”

“Yes,” said Ford.

“This afternoon?”

“Yes,” he said happily, “in less than two minutes.”

The barman couldn’t believe it, but he couldn’t believe the sensation he had just had either.

“Isn’t there anything we can do about it then?” he said.

“No, nothing,” said Ford, stufnif g the peanuts into his pockets.

Someone in the bar suddenly laughed at how stupid everyone had become. The man sitting next to Ford was a bit drunk by now. His looked up at Ford.

“I thought,” he said, “that if the world was going to end, we had to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.”

“If you like, yes,” said Ford.

“That’s what they told us in the army,” said the man and looked back down at his whisky. “Will that help?” asked the barman.

“No,” said Ford and gave him a friendly smile. “Excuse me, I’ve got to go.” With a wave, he left.

The pub was silent for a moment longer, failing to understand that in a minute and a half they would suddenly turn into hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide⁴⁹.

Then the barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say: “Last orders, please.”

* * *

The huge yellow machines began to go down and to move faster.

Ford knew they were there. This wasn’t the way he had wanted it.

Running up the road, Arthur had almost reached his house. He didn’t notice how cold it had suddenly become, he didn’t notice the wind, he didn’t notice the sudden rain. He didn’t notice anything but the bulldozers rolling over what had been his home.

“You barbarians!” he yelled. “I’ll sue the council!”

Ford was running after him very fast. Very, very fast.

“I’ll kill you!” yelled Arthur.

Arthur didn’t notice that the men were actually running away from the bulldozers; he didn’t notice that Mr. Prosser was staring into the sky. What Mr. Prosser had noticed was those huge yellow somethings that were moving through the clouds. Impossibly huge yellow somethings.

“And then I’ll do it again!” yelled Arthur, still running, “until I… until you…”

Arthur tripped and fell on his back. At last he noticed that something was going on. He looked up.

“What the hell’s that?” he shrieked.

Whatever it was moved across the sky and tore it apart with terrible noise.

It’s difficult to say exactly what the people on the surface of the planet were doing now because they didn’t really know what they were doing. None of it made any sense: running into houses, running out of houses, screaming at the noise. All around the world city streets filled with people, cars crashed into each other as the noise fell on them.

Only one man stood and watched the sky, with terrible sadness in his eyes and rubber plugs in his ears⁵⁰. He knew exactly what was happening and had known since his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic had started blinking in the night and woken him up. It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had got the signal, sitting alone in his small dark room, coldness had gripped his heart. Of all the races in the Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, it just didn’t have to be the Vogons.

Still he knew what he had to do. As the Vogon craft moved through the air high above him, he opened his bag. He threw away a couple of things. He wouldn’t need them where he was going. Everything was ready, everything was prepared.

He knew where his towel was.

* * *

A sudden silence hit the Earth. It was worse than the noise. For a while nothing happened.

The great ships hung in the air, over every nation on Earth. They hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, against the law of nature. Many people went into shock as their minds tried to understand what they were looking at. The ships just hung in the sky.

And still nothing happened.

Then there was a whisper, a sudden whisper of sound. Every hi-fi system in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every piece of rusty metal became activated.

Before the Earth was gone, it turned into the greatest public address system⁵¹ ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no siren, just a simple message.

“People of Earth, your attention please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful, perfect sound.

“This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you know, the plans for development of the regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route⁵² through your star system, and your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”

The public address ended.

Terror moved slowly through the crowds of the people of Earth. They started to panic, but there was nowhere to run to.

Seeing all this, the Vogons turned on their public address again. It said: “There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the plans and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri⁵³ for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to complain, and it’s too late to start making a fuss⁵⁴ about it now.”

The public address was silent again and its echo drifted across the land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky. On the underside of each ship a hatchway⁵⁵ opened, an empty black space.

By this time somebody somewhere had used a radio transmitter and sent a message back to the Vogon ships, on behalf of⁵⁶ the planet. Nobody ever heard what it said, they only heard the answer.

The public address was turned on again. The voice was annoyed. It said:

“What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven’s sake⁵⁷, mankind, it’s only four light years away! I’m sorry, but if you don’t take any interest in the local affairs, that’s your own problem. Energize the demolition beams.”

Light poured out of the hatchways.

“I don’t know,” said the voice on the PA again, “bloody apathetic planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.” It cut off.⁵⁸

There was a terrible silence.

There was a terrible noise.

There was a terrible silence.

The Vogon Constructor fleet moved away into the black starry void.

Chapter 4

Far away, at the other end of the Galaxy, five hundred thousand light years from the star Sol, Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, sped across the seas of Damogran in his ion-drive⁵⁹ delta-boat. Damogran the hot; Damogran the remote; Damogran the almost totally unknown.

Damogran – the secret home of the Heart of Gold.

The boat sped on across the water. Damogran is such an inconveniently arranged planet. It consists only of large desert islands separated by very pretty but annoyingly wide oceans.

The boat sped on and on.

Because of this inconvenient arrangement Damogran has always been a deserted planet. This is why the Imperial Galactic Government chose Damogran for the Heart of Gold project, because it was so deserted and the Heart of Gold was so secret.

The boat sped across the sea, the sea that lay between the main islands of the only archipelago on the whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (by coincidence, in Galacticspeke⁶⁰, easter means “small, flat and light brown”) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another coincidence was called France.

But it was not a coincidence that today, the day of culmination of the project, the great day when the Heart of Gold would finally be introduced to the Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the President⁶¹, a decision which had shocked everyone in the Imperial Galaxy – Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the ⁶² Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President?

Many had decided that the whole Creation had finally gone crazy. Zaphod Beeblebrox – adventurer, ex-hippy, good-timer, manic self-publicist⁶³, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out of his mind⁶⁴ – President?

Yes, President.

* * *

Full title: President of the Imperial Galactic Government. The term Imperial is kept though the real Emperor is almost dead and has been so for many centuries. In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a stasis field⁶⁵ which simply keeps him in this state. All his heirs are now long dead, and this means that power has simply and effectively moved to the Governmental Assembly and a President elected by that Assembly.

The President is actually a figurehead – he has no real power whatsoever. He is chosen by the government, but the President is always a strange choice, always a fascinating character. His job is to draw attention away from the power. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had – he has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud.

Very, very few people realize that the President and the Government have no power at all, and of these very few people only six know whom the political power belongs to. Most of the others secretly believe that the decision-making is done by a computer. They can’t be more wrong.⁶⁶

So only six people in the Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his plan to run for President it was more or less done: he was the ideal candidate.

What they failed to understand was why Zaphod was doing it.

* * *

Zaphod grinned and sped up the boat. Today was the day. Today was the day when they would realize what Zaphod had been planning. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox’s Presidency was all about. Today was also his two-hundredth birthday, but that was just another coincidence.

As he steered his boat across the seas of Damogran he smiled quietly to himself about what a wonderful exciting day it was going to be. He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily along the back of his seat, steering with an extra arm he’d recently fitted just below his right one.

“Hey,” he said to himself, “you’re a real cool boy, you know.”

But he was still nervous.

* * *

The island of France was about twenty miles long, five miles wide, sandy and crescent shaped, forming a huge bay. Its coastline was mostly cliffs. On top of the cliffs stood the reception committee. It consisted of the engineers and researchers who had built the Heart of Gold – mostly humanoid, but here and there were a few reptiloids, two or three green maximegalacticans, an octopoid or two, and a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue). All except the Hooloovoo were wearing their multicolored lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been shaped into a prism for the occasion.

All of them were excited and thrilled.

* * *

Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.

The crowd gasped⁶⁷ as the shiny Presidential speedboat entered the bay, splashing water in every direction. In fact, it didn’t need to touch the water at all because it was running on a cushion of ionized atoms – but just for effect it had thin blades which could be lowered into the water.

Zaphod loved effect: it was what he was best at.

He turned the wheel sharply, the boat spun around wildly and stopped on the rocking waves.

Zaphod ran out onto the deck and waved and grinned at over three billion people. The three billion people weren’t actually there, but they watched his every move through the eyes of a small robot tri-D camera which hovered in the air nearby. The antics of the President always made amazingly popular tri-D; that’s what they were for.

Zaphod grinned again.

Three billion and six people didn’t know it, but today they would see the biggest antic ever.

The robot camera gave a close-up of the more popular of the President’s two heads and he waved again. He was mostly humanoid in appearance except for the extra head and third arm. His fair hair stuck out in every direction, his blue eyes shone, and his chins were almost always unshaven.

A huge transparent globe floated next to his boat, rolling and shining in the brilliant sun. Inside it there was a wide red leather sofa: the more the globe rolled on the waves, the more the sofa stayed perfectly still.

Again, all was done for effect.

Zaphod stepped through the wall of the globe and relaxed on the sofa. He spread his two arms lazily along the back and with the third one he brushed some dust off his knee. His heads looked around, smiling.

Water boiled up under the globe. The globe went up in the air. Up, up it climbed.

Zaphod smiled, picturing himself.

At the top of the cliff the globe hovered for a moment, then rolled down a small platform and stopped.

To great applause Zaphod Beeblebrox stepped out of the globe.

The President of the Galaxy had arrived.

He waited for the applause to die down, then raised his hands in greeting.

“Hi,” he said.

A government spider came up to him and tried to put a copy of his prepared speech into his hands. Pages three to seven of the speech were at the moment floating in the Damogran Sea about five miles away from the bay. Pages one and two had been stolen by a Damogran Eagle and had already become a part of his new nest.

Zaphod Beeblebrox would not need his prepared speech this time.

“Hi,” he said again.

Everyone smiled at him, or, at least, almost everyone. He saw Trillian in the crowd. Trillian was a girl that Zaphod had picked up recently while visiting a planet, just for fun, incognito. She was slim, humanoid, with long black hair, a full mouth, a strange little nose and ridiculously brown eyes. Trillian wasn’t anybody special, or so Zaphod said. She just went around with him a lot and told him what she thought of him.

“Hi honey,” he said to her.

She gave him a quick smile and looked away. Then she looked back for a moment and smiled more warmly – but by this time he was looking at something else.

“Hi,” Zaphod said to a small group of creatures from the press who were standing nearby, wishing that he would stop saying “hi” and give his speech which they could quote.

He grinned at them because he knew that in a few moments he would be giving them one hell of a quote⁶⁸.

The next thing he said though was not a lot of use to them either.

One of the officials had decided that the President was clearly not in a mood to read the speech that had been written for him, and had pressed a button on the remote control device⁶⁹ in his pocket. Away in front of them a huge white dome split in the middle and slowly opened. Everyone gasped although they had known perfectly well it was going to do that because they had built it that way.

Beneath the dome there was a huge starship, one hundred and fifty meters long, shaped like a running shoe, perfectly white and beautiful. At the heart of it, unseen, was a small gold box which contained a marvelous device that made this starship unique in the history of the Galaxy, a device after which the ship had been named – The Heart of Gold.

“Wow,” said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold.

There wasn’t much else he could say.

He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press. “Wow.”

The crowd turned their faces towards him, waiting. He winked at Trillian who raised her eyebrows. She knew what he was going to say and thought that he was a terrible showoff.

“That is really amazing,” Zaphod said. “That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing that I think I’d like to steal it.”

An absolutely marvelous Presidential quote. The crowd laughed, the newsmen happily pushed buttons on their Sub-Etha News-Matics, and the President grinned.

As he grinned he touched the small Paralyso-Matic bomb that lay quietly in his pocket.

Finally he couldn’t wait any longer. He lifted his heads up to the sky, let out a wild cry, threw the bomb to the ground and ran forward through the sea of suddenly frozen smiles.