Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [70]
He yawned and fell asleep.
In the morning as they prepared to take him to some quiet and idyllic planet where they wouldn’t mind his talking like that, they suddenly picked up a computer-driven distress call and diverted to investigate.
A small but apparently undamaged spacecraft of the Merida class seemed to be dancing a strange little jig through the void. A brief computer scan revealed that the ship was fine, its computer was fine but that its pilot was mad.
“Half-mad, half-mad,” the man insisted as they carried him, raving, aboard.
He was a journalist with the Sidereal Daily Mentioner. They sedated him and sent Marvin in to keep him company until he promised to try to talk sense.
“I was covering a trial,” he said at last, “on Argabuthon.”
He pushed himself up onto his thin and wasted shoulders; his eyes stared wildly. His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it knew in the next room.
“Easy, easy,” said Ford. Trillian put a soothing hand on his shoulder.
The man sank back down again, and stared at the ceiling of the ship’s sick bay.
“The case,” he said, “is now immaterial, but there was a witness … a witness … a man called … called Prak. A strange and difficult man. They were eventually forced to administer a drug to make him tell the truth, a truth drug.”
His eyes rolled helplessly in his head.
“They gave him too much,” he said in a tiny whimper, “they gave him much too much.” He started to cry. “I think the robots must have jogged the surgeon’s arm.”
“Robots?” asked Zaphod sharply. “What robots?”
“Some white robots,” whispered the man hoarsely, “broke into the courtroom and stole the Judge’s Scepter, the Argabuthon Scepter of Justice, nasty plastic thing. I don’t know why they wanted it”—he began to cry again—“and I think they jogged the surgeon’s arm….”
He shook his head loosely from side to side, helplessly, sadly, his eyes screwed up in pain.
“And when the trial continued,” he said in a weeping whisper, “they asked Prak a most unfortunate thing. They asked him”—he paused and shivered—“to tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. Only, don’t you see?”
He suddenly hoisted himself up onto his elbows again and shouted at them.
“They’d given him much too much of the drug!”
He collapsed again, moaning quietly. “Much too much too much too much too …”
The group gathered around his bedside glanced at one another. There were goose bumps on backs.
“What happened?” said Zaphod at last.
“Oh, he told it all right,” said the man savagely, “for all I know he’s still telling it now. Strange, terrible things … terrible terrible!” he screamed.
They tried to calm him, but he struggled to his elbows again.
“Terrible things, incomprehensible things,” he shouted, “things that would drive a man mad!”
He stared wildly at them.
“Or in my case,” he said, “half-mad. I’m a journalist.”
“You mean,” said Arthur quietly, “that you are used to confronting the truth?”
“No,” said the man with a puzzled frown, “I mean that I made an excuse and left early.”
He collapsed into a coma from which he recovered only once and briefly.
On that one occasion, they discovered from him the following:
When it became clear what was happening, and as it became clear that Prak could not be stopped, that here was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.
Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it. Steel walls were erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side, barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps and three major