Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [19]
He was pointing as well as he could manage, and he obviously wanted to make it totally clear that this was as well as he could manage, through the mist, over the reeds, to a part of the marsh that looked exactly the same as every other part of the marsh.
“There,” he repeated. “I was somewhat of a celebrity at the time.”
Excitement gripped the mattress. It had never heard of speeches being delivered on Sqornshellous Zeta, and certainly not by celebrities. Water spattered off it as a thrill glurried across its back.
It did something that mattresses very rarely bother to do. Summoning every bit of its strength, it reared its oblong body, heaved it up into the air and held it quivering there for a few seconds until it peered through the mist over the reeds at the part of the marsh that Marvin had indicated, observing, without disappointment, that it was exactly the same as every other part of the marsh. The effort was too much, and it flodged back into its pool, deluging Marvin with smelly mud, moss and weeds.
“I was a celebrity,” droned the robot sadly, “for a short while on account of my miraculous and bitterly resented escape from a fate almost as good as death in the heart of a blazing sun. You can guess from my condition,” he added, “how narrow my escape was. I was rescued by a scrap-metal merchant, imagine that. Here I am, brain the size of … never mind.”
He trudged savagely for a few seconds.
“He it was who fixed me up with this leg. Hateful, isn’t it? He sold me to a Mind Zoo. I was the star exhibit. I had to sit on a box and tell my story while people told me to cheer up and think positive. ‘Give us a grin, little robot,’ they would shout at me, ‘give us a little chuckle.’ I would explain to them that to get my face to grin would take a good couple of hours in a workshop with a wrench, and that went down very well.”
“The speech,” urged the mattress, “I long to hear of the speech you gave in the marshes.”
“There was a bridge built across the marshes. A cyberstructured hyperbridge, hundreds of miles in length, to carry ionbuggies and freighters over the swamp.”
“A bridge?” quirruled the mattress, “here, in the swamp?”
“A bridge,” confirmed Marvin, “here in the swamp. It was going to revitalize the economy of the Sqornshellous System. They spent the entire economy of the Sqornshellous System building it. They asked me to open it. Poor fools.”
It began to rain a little, a fine spray slid through the mist.
“I stood on the platform. For hundreds of miles in front of me, and hundreds of miles behind me the bridge stretched.”
“Did it glitter?” enthused the mattress.
“It glittered.”
“Did it span the miles majestically?”
“It spanned the miles majestically.”
“Did it stretch like a silver thread, far out into the invisible mist?”
“Yes,” said Marvin, “do you want to hear this story?”
“I want to hear your speech,” said the mattress.
“This is what I said. I said, ‘I would like to say that it is a very great pleasure, honor and privilege for me to open this bridge, but I can’t because my lying circuits are all out of commission. I hate and despise you all. I now declare this hapless cyberstructure open to the unthinking abuse of all who wantonly cross her.’ And I plugged myself into the opening circuits.”
Marvin paused, remembering the moment.
The mattress flurred and glurried. It flolloped, gupped and willomied, doing this last in a particularly floopy way.
“Voon,” it wurfed at last, “and was it a magnificent occasion?”
“Reasonably magnificent. The entire thousand-mile-long bridge spontaneously folded up its glittering spans and sank weeping into the mire, taking everybody with it.”
There was a sad and terrible pause at this point in the conversation during which a hundred thousand people seemed unexpectedly to say “whop” and a team of white robots descended from the sky like dandelion seeds drifting on the wind in tight military formation. For a sudden violent moment they were all