Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [38]
It wasn’t even the climax of the book, because there wasn’t one. The character died about a third of the way through the penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were on Bartledan.
Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyper-spatial starships, eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.
The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won’t. That is not what “accident” means. The accident that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.
The ship’s systems protested all the way down that everything was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and finally exploded into a seething ball of flame, it became clear that this was not the case.
Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are now required to do by law. For a short while afterward, other small fires flared up here and there as odd pieces of scattered debris exploded quietly in their own time. Then they too died away.
Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless interstellar flight was the only one on board who actually had familiarized himself with the ship’s safety procedures in case of an unscheduled landing, was the sole survivor. He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic cocoon with “Have a nice day” printed in more than three thousand different languages all over it.
Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta.
After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.
Chapter 12
Ford tumbled through the open air in a cloud of glass splinters and chair parts. Again, he hadn’t really thought things through, really, and was just playing it by ear, buying time. At times of major crisis he found it was often quite helpful to have his life flash before his eyes. It gave him a chance to reflect on things, see things in some sort of perspective, and it sometimes furnished him with a vital clue as to what to do next.
There was the ground rushing up to meet him at thirty feet per second, but he would, he thought, deal with that problem when he got to it. First things first.
Ah, here it came. His childhood. Humdrum stuff, he’d been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes, he knew all that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain. His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on, come on.
He was twisting and turning downward, the outside air at this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.
Early voyages to other planets. Oh, for Zark’s sake, this was like some sort of bloody travelog documentary before the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.
Ah!
Those were the days. They worked out of a hut on the Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the Donqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful of highly sophisticated