So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (15 page)

"Tactful," said Arthur Dent.
"Exactly," said Ford, "tactful."
He frowned.
"Space-lag," he said, "is very bad for sub-clauses. You'll have to assist me again," he continued, "by reminding me what I was talking about."
"`Between the stars,'" said Arthur, "`known on your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady, as ...'"
"`Pleiades Epsilon and Pleiades Zeta,'" concluded Ford triumphantly. "This conversation lark is quite gas isn't it?"
"Have some coffee."
"Thank you, no. `And the reason,' I said, `why I am bothering you with it rather than just dialling direct as I could, because we have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications equipment out here in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny pinching son of a starbeast piloting this son of a starbeast spaceship insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?'"
"And could she?"
"I don't know. She had hung up," said Ford, "by this time. So! What do you suppose," he asked fiercely, "I did next?"
"I've no idea, Ford," said Arthur.
"Pity," said Ford, "I was hoping you could remind me. I really hate those guys you know. They really are the creeps of the cosmos, buzzing around the celestial infinite with their junky little machines that never work properly or, when they do, perform functions that no sane man would require of them and," he added savagely, "go beep to tell you when they've done it!"
This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.
"In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
"And this guy," ranted Ford, "was on a drive to sell more of them! His five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators and wine bars! Or if they didn't have restaurants, elevators and wine bars yet, to artificially accelerate their civilization growth until they bloody well did have! Where's that coffee!"
"I threw it away."
"Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next. I saved civilization as we know it. I knew it was something like that."
He stumbled determinedly back into the sitting room, where he seemed to carry on talking to himself, tripping over the furniture and making beep beep noises.
A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid face, Arthur followed him.
Ford looked stunned.
"Where have you been?" he demanded.
"Making some coffee," said Arthur, still wearing his very placid face. He had long ago realized that the only way of being in Ford's company successfully was to keep a large stock of very placid faces and wear them at all times.
"You missed the best bit!" raged Ford. "You missed the bit where I jumped the guy! Now," he said, "I shall have to jump him, all over him!"
He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it.
"It was better," he said sullenly, "last time," and waved vaguely in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got trussed up on the dining table.
"I see," said Arthur, casting a placid eye over the trussed up wreckage, "and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?"
"What?" screamed Ford. "What? You missed that bit too? That's the suspended animation facility! I put the guy in the suspended animation facility. Well I had to didn't I?"
"So it would seem," said Arthur, in his placid voice.
"Don't touch that!!!" yelled Ford.
Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which was for some mysterious reason lying on the table, off the hook, paused, placidly.
"OK," said Ford, calming down, "listen to it."
Arthur put the phone to his ear.
"It's the speaking clock," he said.
"Beep, beep, beep," said Ford, "is exactly what is being heard all over that guy's ship, while he sleeps, in the ice, going slowly round a little-known moon of Sesefras Magna. The London Speaking Clock!"
"I see," said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time to ask the big one.
"Why?" he said, placidly.
"With a bit of luck," said Ford, "the phone bill will bankrupt the buggers."
He threw himself, sweating, on to the sofa.
"Anyway," he said, "dramatic arrival don't you think?"
Chapter 36
The flying saucer in which Ford Prefect had stowed away had stunned the world.
Finally there was no doubt, no possibility of mistake, no hallucinations, no mysterious CIA agents found floating in reservoirs.
This time it was real, it was definite. It was quite definitely definite.
It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything beneath it and crushed a large area of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including much of Harrods.
The thing was massive, nearly a mile across, some said, dull silver in colour, pitted, scorched and disfigured with the scars of unnumbered vicious space battles fought with savage forces by the light of suns unknown to man.
A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods Food Halls, demolished Harvey Nicholls, and with a final grinding scream of tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower.
After a long, heart-stopping moment of internal crashes and grumbles of rending machinery, there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.
It held up a hand.
"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see ..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards role the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
"But that's terrible," said Arthur.
"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairan dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say `That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin. But I haven't and I am. Anyway, what are you looking so placid and moon-eyed for? Are you in love?"
Arthur said yes, he was, and said it placidly.
"With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet her?"
He did because Fenchurch came in at that moment with a pile of newspapers she'd been into the village to buy. She stopped in astonishment at the wreckage on the table and the wreckage from Betelgeuse on the sofa.
"Where's the gin?" said Ford to Fenchurch. And to Arthur, "What happened to Trillian by the way?"
"Er, this is Fenchurch," said Arthur, awkwardly. "There was nothing with Trillian, you must have seen her last."
"Oh, yeah," said Ford, "she went off with Zaphod somewhere. They had some kids or something. At least," he added, "I think that's what they were. Zaphod's calmed down a lot you know."
"Really?" said Arthur, clustering hurriedly round Fenchurch to relieve her of the shopping.
"Yeah," said Ford, "at least one of his heads is now saner than an emu on acid."
"Arthur, who is this?" said Fenchurch.
"Ford Prefect," said Arthur. "I may have mentioned him in passing."
Chapter 37
For a total of three days and nights the giant silver robot stood in stunned amazement straddling the remains of Knightsbridge, swaying slightly and trying to work out a number of things.
Government deputations came to see it, ranting journalists by the truckload asked each other questions on the air about what they thought of it, flights of fighter bombers tried pathetically to attack it - but no lizards appeared. It scanned the horizon slowly.
At night it was at its most spectacular, floodlit by the teams of television crews who covered it continuously as it continuously did nothing.
It thought and thought and eventually reached a conclusion.
It would have to send out its service robots.
It should have thought of that before, but it was having a number of problems.
The tiny flying robots came screeching out of the hatchway one afternoon in a terrifying cloud of metal. They roamed the surrounding terrain, frantically attacking some things and defending others.
One of them at last found a pet shop with some lizards, but it instantly defended the pet shop for democracy so savagely that little in the area survived.
A turning point came when a crack team of flying screechers discovered the Zoo in Regent's Park, and most particularly the reptile house.
Learning a little caution from their previous mistakes in the petshop, the flying drills and fretsaws brought some of the larger and fatter iguanas to the giant silver robot, who tried to conduct high-level talks with them.
Eventually the robot announced to the world that despite the full, frank and wide-ranging exchange of views the high level talks had broken down, the lizards had been retired, and that it, the robot would take a short holiday somewhere, and for some reason selected Bournemouth.
Ford Prefect, watching it on TV, nodded, laughed, and had another beer.
Immediate preparations were made for its departure.
The flying toolkits screeched and sawed and drilled and fried things with light throughout that day and all through the night time, and in the morning, stunningly, a giant mobile gantry started to roll westwards on several roads simultaneously with the robot standing on it, supported within the gantry.
Westward it crawled, like a strange carnival buzzed around by its servants and helicopters and news coaches, scything through the land until at last it came to Bournemouth, where the robot slowly freed itself from it transport system's embraces and went and lay for ten days on the beach.
It was, of course, by far the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Bournemouth.
Crowds gathered daily along the perimeter which was staked out and guarded as the robot's recreation area, and tried to see what it was doing.
It was doing nothing. It was lying on the beach. It was lying a little awkwardly on its face.
It was a journalist from a local paper who, late one night, managed to do what no one else in the world had so far managed, which was to strike up a brief intelligible conversation with one of the service robots guarding the perimeter.
It was an extraordinary breakthrough.
"I think there's a story in it," confided the journalist over a cigarette shared through the steel link fence, "but it needs a good local angle. I've got a little list of questions here," he went on, rummaging awkwardly in an inner pocket, "perhaps you could get him, it, whatever you call him, to run through them quickly."
The little flying ratchet screwdriver said it would see what it cold do and screeched off.
A reply was never forthcoming.
Curiously, however, the questions on the piece of paper more or less exactly matched the questions that were going through the massive battle-scarred industrial quality circuits of the robot's mind. They were these:
"How do you feel about being a robot?"
"How does it feel to be from outer space?" and
"How do you like Bournemouth?"
Early the following day things started to be packed up and within a few days it became apparent that the robot was preparing to leave for good.
"The point is," said Fenchurch to Ford, "can you get us on board?"
Ford looked wildly at his watch.
"I have some serious unfinished business to attend to," he exclaimed.
Chapter 38
Crowds thronged as close as they could to the giant silver craft, which wasn't very. The immediate perimeter was fenced off and patrolled by the tiny flying service robots. Staked out around that was the army, who had been completely unable to breach that inner perimeter, but were damned if anybody was going to breach them. They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though whether they were there to protect the public from the army or the army from the public, or to guarantee the giant ship's diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting parking tickets was entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.
The inner perimeter fence was now being dismantled. The army stirred uncomfortably, uncertain of how to react to the fact that the reason for their being there seemed as if it was simply going to get up and go.
The giant robot had lurched back aboard the ship at lunchtime, and now it was five o'clock in the afternoon and no further sign had been seen of it. Much had been heard - more grindings and rumblings from deep within the craft, the music of a million hideous malfunctions; but the sense of tense expectation among the crowd was born of the fact that they tensely expected to be disappointed. This wonderful extraordinary thing had come into their lives, an now it was simply going to go without them.