Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [38]
This happened to every noise he made, and it unnerved him. He tried to hum a cheery tune, but by the time it returned to him it was a hollow dirge and he stopped.
His mind was suddenly full of images from the story that Slartibartfast had been telling him. He half expected suddenly to see lethal white robots step silently from the shadows and kill him. He caught his breath. They didn’t. He let it go again. He didn’t know what he did expect.
Someone or something, however, seemed to be expecting him, for at that moment there lit up suddenly in the dark distance an eerie green neon sign.
It said, silently:
YOU HAVE BEEN DIVERTED
The sign flicked off again, in a way that Arthur was not at all certain he liked. It flicked off with a sort of contemptuous flourish. Arthur then tried to assure himself that this was just a ridiculous trick of his imagination. A neon sign is either on or off, depending on whether it has electricity running through it or not. There was no way, he told himself, that it could possibly effect the transition from one state to the other with a contemptuous flourish. He hugged himself tightly in his dressing gown and shivered, nevertheless.
The neon sign in the depths now, suddenly lit up, bafflingly, with just three dots and a comma. Like this:
…,
Only in green neon.
It was trying, Arthur realized after staring at this perplexedly for a second or two, to indicate that there was more to come, that the sentence was not complete. Trying with almost superhuman pedantry, he further reflected. Or at least, nonhuman pedantry.
The sentence then completed itself with these two words:
ARTHUR DENT.
He reeled. He steadied himself to have another clear look at it. It still said ARTHUR DENT, SO he reeled again.
Once again, the sign flicked off, and left him blinking in the darkness with just the dim red image of his name jumping on his retina.
WELCOME, the sign now suddenly said.
After a moment, it added:
I DON’T THINK.
The stone-cold fear which had been hovering around Arthur all this time waiting for its moment, recognized that its moment had now come and pounced on him. He tried to fight it off. He dropped into a kind of alert crouch that he had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with stronger knees. He peered huntedly into the darkness.
“Er, hello?” he said.
He cleared his throat and said it again, more loudly and without the “er.” At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started to beat on a bass drum.
He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating.
He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn’t his heart, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves and leaped off. He put out a hand onto the floor to steady his alert crouch, which wasn’t holding up very well. The sign changed itself again. It said:
DO NOT BE ALARMED.
After a pause, it added:
BE VERY, VERY FRIGHTENED, ARTHUR DENT.
Once again it flicked off. Once again it left him in darkness. His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn’t certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point.
“Hello?” he said again, this time trying to put a note of rugged and aggressive self-assertion into it. “Is anyone there?”
There was no reply, nothing.
This unnerved Arthur even more than a reply would have done, and he began to back away from the scary nothingness. And the more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while, he realized that the reason for this was that in all the films he had seen in which the hero backs farther and farther away from some imagined terror in front of him, he then manages to bump into it coming up from behind.
At this point it suddenly occurred to him to turn round rather quickly.
There was nothing