The Restaurant at the End of the Universe [50]
And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the sub-ether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.
Many people had thought exactly this before Arthur Dent and had even gone to the lengths of writing songs about it. Here is one that used regularly to be chanted by huge crowds outside the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Teleport Systems factory on Happi-Werld III:
Aldebaran's great, OK,
Algol's pretty neat,
Betelgeuse's pretty girls,
Will knock you off your feet.
They'll do anything you like,
Real fast and then real slow,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there,
Then I don't want to go.
Singing,
Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam,
And if you have to take me apart to get me there,
I'd rather stay at home.
Sirius is paved with gold
So I've heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
"See Tau before you're dead."
I'll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there,
Then I, for one, won't go.
Singing,
Take me apart, take me apart, You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there,
I'll stay right here in bed.
I teleported home one night,
With Ron and Sid and Meg,
Ron stole Meggie's heart away,
And I got Sidney's leg.
Arthur felt the waves of pain slowly receding, though he was still aware of a dull stomping throb. Slowly, carefully, he stood up.
"Can you hear a dull stomping throb?" said Ford Prefect.
Arthur span round and wobbled uncertainly. Ford Prefect was approaching looking red eyed and pasty.
"Where are we?" gasped Arthur.
Ford looked around. They were standing in a long curving corridor which stretched out of sight in both directions. The outer steel wall — which was painted in that sickly shade of pale green which they use in schools, hospitals and mental asylums to keep the inmates subdued — curved over the tops of their heads where it met the inner perpendicular wall which, oddly enough was covered in dark brown hessian wall weave. The floor was of dark green ribbed rubber.
Ford moved over to a very thick dark transparent panel set in the outer wall. It was several layers deep, yet through it he could see pinpoints of distant stars.
"I think we're in a spaceship of some kind," he said.
Down the corridor came the sound of a dull stomping throb.
"Trillian?" called Arthur nervously, "Zaphod?"
Ford shrugged.
"Nowhere about," he said, "I've looked. They could be anywhere. An unprogrammed teleport can throw you light years in any direction. Judging by the way I feel I should think we've travelled a very long way indeed."
"How do you feel?"
"Bad."
"Do you think they're ..."
"Where they are, how they are, there's no way we can know and no way we can do anything about it. Do what I do."
"What?"
"Don't think about it."
Arthur turned this thought over in his mind, reluctantly saw the wisdom of it, tucked it up and put it away. He took a deep breath.
"Footsteps!" exclaimed Ford suddenly.
"Where?"
"That noise. That stomping throb. Pounding feet. Listen!"
Arthur listened. The noise echoed round the corridor at them from an indeterminate distance. It was the muffled sound of pounding footsteps, and it was noticeably louder.
"Let's move," said Ford sharply. They both moved — in opposite directions.
"Not that way," said Ford, "that's where they're coming from."
"No it's not," said Arthur, "They're coming from that way."
"They're not, they're ..."
They both stopped. They both turned. They both listened intently. They both agreed with each other. They both set off into opposite directions again.
Fear gripped them.
From both