Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [66]
Arthur could hardly bear the fact that it was the same sofa that had appeared to him in the fields of prehistoric Earth. He wanted to shout and shake with rage that the Universe kept doing these insanely bewildering things to him.
He let this feeling subside, and then sat on the sofa—carefully. Trillian sat on it, too.
It was real.
At least, if it wasn’t real, it did support them, and as that is what sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa.
The voice on the solar wind breathed to them again.
“I hope you are comfortable,” it said.
They nodded.
“And I would like to congratulate you on the accuracy of your deductions.”
Arthur quickly pointed out that he hadn’t deduced anything much himself, Trillian was the one. She had simply asked him along because he was interested in life, the Universe and everything.
“That is something in which I, too, am interested,” breathed Hactar.
“Well,” said Arthur, “we should have a chat about it sometime. Over a cup of tea.”
There slowly materialized in front of them a small wooden table on which sat a silver teapot, a bone china milk jug, a bone china sugar bowl and two bone china cups and saucers.
Arthur reached forward, but they were just a trick of the light. He leaned back on the sofa, which was an illusion his body was prepared to accept as comfortable.
“Why,” said Trillian, “do you feel you have to destroy the Universe?”
She found it a little difficult talking into nothingness, with nothing on which to focus. Hactar obviously noticed this. He chuckled a ghostly chuckle.
“If it’s going to be that sort of session,” he said, “we may as well have the right sort of setting.”
And now there materialized in front of them something new. It was the dim hazy image of a couch—a psychiatrist’s couch. The leather with which it was up-holstered was shiny and sumptuous, but again, it was only a trick of the light.
Around them, to complete the setting, was the hazy suggestion of wood-paneled walls. And then, on the couch, appeared the image of Hactar himself, and it was an eye-twisting image.
The couch looked normal size for a psychiatrist’s couch—about five or six feet long.
The computer looked normal size for a black spaceborne computer satellite—about a thousand miles across.
The illusion that the one was sitting on top of the other was the thing that made the eyes twist.
“All right,” said Trillian firmly. She stood up from the sofa. She felt that she was being asked to feel too comfortable and to accept too many illusions.
“Very good,” she said. “Can you construct real things, too? I mean solid objects?”
Again, there was the pause before the answer, as if the pulverized mind of Hactar had to collect its thoughts from the millions and millions of miles over which it was scattered.
“Ah,” he sighed, “you are thinking of the spaceship.”
Thoughts seemed to drift by them and through them, like waves through the ether.
“Yes,” he acknowledged, “I can. But it takes enormous effort and time. All I can do in my … particle state, you see, is encourage and suggest. Encourage and suggest. And suggest …”
The image of Hactar on the couch seemed to billow and waver, as if finding it hard to maintain itself.
It gathered new strength.
“I can encourage and suggest,” it said, “tiny pieces of space debris—the odd minute meteor, a few molecules here, a few hydrogen atoms there—to move together. I encourage them together. I can tease them into shape, but it takes many eons.”
“So, did you make,” asked Trillian again, “the model of the wrecked spacecraft?”
“Er… yes,” murmured Hactar, “I have made … a few things. I can move them about. I made the spacecraft. It seemed best to do.”
Something at this point made Arthur pick up his tote bag from where he had left it on the sofa and grasp it tightly.
The mist of Hactar’s ancient shattered mind swirled about them as if uneasy dreams were moving through it.
“I repented, you see,” he murmured dolefully. “I repented of sabotaging my own design for the Silastic Armorfiends. It was not my