The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5)

by Douglas Adams

About two miles away behind Random, her father, struggling his way through the woods, suddenly stopped. He was startled to see an image of himself looking startled about something hanging brightly in the rain-filled air about two miles away. About two miles away some distance to the right of the direction in which he was heading. He was almost completely lost, was convinced he was going to die of cold and wet and exhaustion and was beginning to wish he could just get on with it. He had just been brought an entire golfing magazine by a squirrel, as well, and his brain was beginning to howl and gibber. Seeing a huge bright image of himself light up in the sky told him that, on balance, he was probably right to howl and gibber but probably wrong as far as the direction he was heading was concerned. Taking a deep breath, he turned and headed off toward the inexplicable light show.

A little less than two miles away now, Arthur Dent stood still in his tracks. He could not believe what he could see, hanging there, shrouded in rain, but brilliant and vividly real against the night sky— the Earth. He gasped at the sight of it. Then, at the moment he gasped, it disappeared again. Then it appeared again.

Gone. Random was in it. It was impossible for Arthur to know this, but he just went ahead and knew it anyway. She was gone. He had had his stint at being a parent and could scarcely believe how badly he had done at it. He tried to continue running, but his feet were dragging, his knee was hurting like fury and he knew that he was too late.

“No! It is fantastically stupid. Look. The machine’s only a little Guide. It’s got some quite clever cybertechnology in it, but because it has Unfiltered Perception, any smallest move it makes has the power of a virus. It can propagate throughout space, time and a million other dimensions. Anything can be focused anywhere in any of the universes that you and I move in. Its power is recursive. Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where’s the final ‘end if’? Is any of this making sense? Arthur?”

“I said,” shouted Ford, “this looks like it might be some kind of evidence of dimensional drift.” “Which is what?” shouted Arthur back. “Well, a lot of people are beginning to worry that spacetime is showing signs of cracking up with everything that’s happening to it. There are quite a lot of worlds where you can see how the landmasses have cracked up and moved around just from the weirdly long or meandering routes that migrating animals take. This might be something like that. We live in twisted times. Still, in the absence of a decent spaceport…”

“It’s all right,” muttered Arthur, “he always talks like that.” Aloud, he said, “Ah, venerable Thrashbarg. Um, yes. I’m afraid I think I’m going to have to be popping off now. But young Drimple, my apprentice, will be a fine sandwich maker in my stead. He has the aptitude, a deep love of sandwiches and the skills he has acquired so far, though rudimentary as yet, will, in time, mature, and, er, well, I think he’ll work out okay is what I’m trying to say.” Old Thrashbarg regarded him gravely.

All of this riveting stuff was on the tape, and fine viewing it made. First of all the picture quality was extremely poor. Tricia didn’t know why this was, exactly. She had a feeling that the Grebulons responded to a slightly different range of light frequencies, and that there had been a lot of ultraviolet around, which was mucking up the video camera. There were a lot of interference patterns and video snow as well. Probably something to do with the warp drive that none of them knew the first thing about. So what she had on tape, essentially, was a bunch of slightly thin and discolored people sitting around watching televisions that were showing network broadcasts. She had also pointed the camera out of the very tiny viewport near her seat and got a nice, slightly streaky effect of stars. She knew it was real, but it would have taken a good three or four minutes to fake.

Ah. Now, the next bit had been quite promising. They had emerged out of the ship into a vast, gray hangarlike structure. This was clearly alien technology on a dramatic scale. Huge gray buildings under the dark canopy of the Perspex bubble. These were the same buildings that she had been looking at at the end of the tape. She had taken more footage of them while leaving Rupert a few hours later, just as she was about to reboard the spacecraft for the journey home. What did they remind her of?

The Leader had looked pretty much like all the others. Possibly a bit less thin. He said how much he enjoyed her shows on TV, that he was her greatest fan, how glad he was that she had been able to come along and visit them on Rupert and how much everybody had been looking forward to her coming, how he hoped the flight had been comfortable and so on. There was no particular sense she could detect of being any kind of emissary from the stars or anything. Certainly, watching it now on videotape, he just looked like some guy in costume and makeup, standing in front of a set that wouldn’t hold up too well if you leaned against it. She sat staring at the screen with her face cradled in her hands, and shaking her head in slow bewilderment. This was awful.

She hit the fast-forward button again. There was nothing of any use here at all. It was all nightmarish madness.

Well. There was seventeen years of obsession that a glamorous man with two heads, one of which was disguised as a parrot in a cage, had tried to pick her up at a party but had then impatiently flown off to another planet in a flying saucer. There suddenly seemed to be all sorts of bothersome aspects to that idea that had never really occurred to her. Never occurred to her. In seventeen years. She stuffed her fist into her mouth. She must get help.

“We have great skills,” the Leader was saying. “Great skills in computation, in cosmological trigonometry, in three-dimensional navigational calculus. Great skills. Great, great skills. Only we have lost them. It is too bad. We like to have skills, only they have gone. They are in space somewhere, hurtling. With our names and the details of our homes and loved ones. Please,” he said, gesturing her forward to sit at the computer’s console, “be skillful for us.”

She had videotape, actual videotape of the most astounding story in the history of, well, anything: a forgotten outpost of an alien civilization marooned on the outermost planet of our own solar system. She had the story. She had been there. She had seen it. She had the videotape, for God’s sake. And if she ever showed it to anybody, she would be a laughingstock.

She had some aspirin in her bag. She went out of the little editing suite to the water dispenser down the corridor. She took the aspirin and drank several cups of water.

“There!” shouted the producer while the sound engineer hurried to clip a radio mike to her. “She says her mother and father came from here in some parallel dimension or something like that, and she’s got her father’s watch, and…I don’t know. What can I tell you? Busk it. Ask her what it feels like to be from outer space.” “Thanks a lot, Ted,” muttered Tricia. She checked that her mike was securely clipped, gave the engineer some level, took a deep breath, tossed her hair back and switched into her role of professional reporter, on home ground, ready for anything. At least, nearly anything.

Then there were the spaceships parked in front of the bar & grill. Ah. The Domain of the King Bar & Grill. Bit of an anticlimax, thought Arthur to himself.

“Good beer,” he added. “Good ship, too,” he said, eyeing the big pink and chrome insectlike thing, bits of which could be seen through windows of the bar. “Good everything, pretty much. You know,” he said, sitting back, reflectively, “it’s at times like this that you kind of wonder if it’s worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that’s been bugging me. Maybe I feel that what the big guy says is right. Just let it all go. What does it matter? Let it go.”

“Nah,” said Ford. “Piece of piss. Just mention that the rolls were quite good, the beer good and cold, local wildlife nicely eccentric, the bar singer the best in the known universe and that’s about it. Doesn’t need much. Just a validation.”

“More money,” he said, “than the Colonel made for him in an entire career of doing crap movies and casino gigs. Just for doing what he does best. Standing up and singing in a bar. And he negotiated it himself. I think this is a good moment for him. Tell him I said thanks and buy him a drink.” He tossed a few coins on the bar. The barman pushed them away. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said, slightly hoarsely. “ ’Tis to me,” said Ford. “Okay, we are outta here.”

A rather shaken anchorman appeared on the screen and apologized to viewers for the disruption of the previous item. He said he didn’t have any very clear news to report, only that the mysterious girl, who called herself Random Frequent Flyer Dent, had left the studio to, er, rest. Tricia McMillan would be, he hoped, back tomorrow. Meanwhile, fresh reports of UFO activity were coming in…

He stared at it for some time as things began slowly to reassemble themselves in his mind. He wondered what he should do, but he only wondered it idly. Around him people were beginning to rush and shout a lot, but it was suddenly very clear to him that there was nothing to be done, not now or ever. Through the new strangeness of noise and light he could just make out the shape of Ford Prefect sitting back and laughing wildly. A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and forever, it was now all, finally, over.

The Vogon turned on the light himself. He picked up the piece of paper again and placed a little tick in the little box. Well, that was done. His ship slunk off into the inky void.