Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [75]
It wasn’t that the journey had been particularly stressful. It had been extremely dull in fact. Certainly it had been no more stressful than the trip she had just taken across the Atlantic and it had taken roughly the same time, about seven hours.
Well, that was pretty astounding, wasn’t it? Flying to the outer limits of the solar system in the same time that it took to fly to New York meant they must have some fantastic unheard of form of propulsion in the ship. She quizzed her hosts about it and they agreed that it was pretty good.
“But how does it work?” she had demanded excitedly. She was still quite excited at the beginning of the trip.
She found that part of the tape and played it through to herself. The Grebulons, which is what they called themselves, were politely showing her which buttons they pressed to make the ship go.
“Yes, but what principle does it work on?” she heard herself demand, from behind the camera.
“Oh, you mean is it something like a warp drive or something like that?” they said.
“Yes,” persisted Tricia. “What is it?”
“It probably is something of the kind,” they said.
“Like what?”
“Warp drive, photon drive, something like that. You’d have to ask the flight engineer.”
“Which one is he?”
“We don’t know. We have all lost our minds, you see.”
“Oh yes,” said Tricia, a little faintly. “So you said. Um, how did you lose your minds, exactly, then?”
“We don’t know,” they said, patiently.
“Because you’ve lost your minds,” echoed Tricia, glumly.
“Would you like to watch television? It is a long flight. We watch television. It is something we enjoy.”
All of this riveting stuff was on the tape, and fine viewing it made. First of all the picture quality was extremely poor. Tricia didn’t know why this was, exactly. She had a feeling that the Grebulons responded to a slightly different range of light frequencies, and that there had been a lot of ultraviolet around, which was mucking up the video camera. There were a lot of interference patterns and video snow as well. Probably something to do with the warp drive that none of them knew the first thing about.
So what she had on tape, essentially, was a bunch of slightly thin and discolored people sitting around watching televisions that were showing network broadcasts. She had also pointed the camera out of the very tiny viewport near her seat and got a nice, slightly streaky effect of stars. She knew it was real, but it would have taken a good three or four minutes to fake.
In the end she had decided to save her precious videotape for Rupert itself and had simply sat back and watched television with them. She even dozed off for a while.
So part of her sick feeling came from the sense that she had had all that time in an alien spacecraft of astounding technological design, and had spent most of it dozing in front of reruns of “M*A*S*H” and “Cagney and Lacey.” But what else was there to do? She had taken some photos as well, of course, all of which had subsequently turned out to be badly fogged when she got them back from the chemist.
Another part of her sick feeling probably came from the landing on Rupert. This at least had been dramatic and hair-raising. The ship had come sweeping in over a dark and somber landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun, Sol, that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars of the mind of an abandoned child.
Lights blazed through the frozen darkness and guided the ship into the mouth of some kind of cave that seemed to bend itself open to accept the small craft.
Unfortunately, because of the angle of their approach, and the depth at which the small, thick viewport was set into the craft’s skin, it hadn’t been possible to get the video camera to point directly at any of it. She ran through that bit of the tape.
The camera was pointing directly at the sun.
This is normally very bad for a video camera. But when the sun is roughly a third of a billion miles away, it doesn’t do any harm. In fact it hardly makes any impression at all. You just get a small point