The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams [28]
“No,” said Trillian, standing up, “no way at all.”
A dull hoarse gurgling sound came from the floor. It was Zaphod Beeblebrox attempting to speak.
“I certainly didn’t survive,” he gurgled. “I was a total goner. Wham bang and that was it.”
“Yeah, thanks to you,” said Ford, “we didn’t stand a chance. We must have been blown to bits. Arms, legs everywhere.”
“Yeah,” said Zaphod struggling noisily to his feet.
“If the lady and gentlemen would care to order drinks…” said the green blur, hovering impatiently beside them.
“Kerpow, splat,” continued Zaphod, “instantaneously zonked into our component molecules. Hey, Ford,” he said, identifying one of the slowly solidifying blurs around him, “did you get that thing of your whole life flashing before you?”
“You got that too?” said Ford. “Your whole life?”
“Yeah,” said Zaphod, “at least I assume it was mine. I spend a lot of time out of my skulls you know.”
He looked around him at the various shapes that were at last becoming proper shapes instead of vague and wobbling shapeless shapes.
“So…” he said.
“So what?” said Ford.
“So here we are,” said Zaphod hesitantly, “lying dead…”
“Standing,” Trillian corrected him.
“Er, standing dead,” continued Zaphod, “in this desolate…”
“Restaurant,” said Arthur Dent who had got to his feet and could now, much to his surprise, see clearly. That is to say, the thing that surprised him was not that he could see, but what he could see.
“Here we are,” continued Zaphod doggedly, “standing dead in this desolate…”
“Five star,” said Trillian.
“Restaurant,” concluded Zaphod.
“Odd, isn’t it?” said Ford.
“Er, yeah.”
“Nice chandeliers though,” said Trillian.
They looked about themselves in bemusement.
“It’s not so much an afterlife,” said Arthur, “more a sort of après vie.”
The chandeliers were in fact a little on the flashy side and the low vaulted ceiling from which they hung would not, in an ideal Universe, have been painted in that particular shade of deep turquoise, and even if it had been it wouldn’t have been highlighted by concealed moodlighting. This is not, however, an ideal Universe, as was further evidenced by the eye-crossing patterns of the inlaid marble floor, and the way in which the fronting for the eighty-yard-long marble-topped bar had been made. The fronting for the eighty-yard-long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in.
A few smartly dressed creatures were lounging casually at the bar or relaxing in the richly colored body-hugging seats that were deployed here and there about the bar area. A young Vl’Hurg officer and his green steaming young lady passed through the large smoked glass doors at the far end of the bar into the dazzling light of the main body of the Restaurant beyond.
Behind Arthur was a large curtained bay window. He pulled aside the corner of the curtain and looked out at a bleak and dreary landscape, gray, pockmarked and dismal, a landscape which under normal circumstances would have given Arthur the creeping horrors. These were not, however, normal circumstances, for the thing that froze his blood and made his skin try to crawl up his back and off the top of his head was the sky. The sky was…
An attendant flunky politely drew the curtain back into place.
“All in good time, sir,” he said.
Zaphod’s eyes flashed.
“Hey, wait a minute, you dead guys,” he said. “I think we’re missing some ultraimportant thing here, you know. Something somebody said and we missed it.”
Arthur was profoundly relieved to turn his attention from what he had just seen.
He said, “I said it was a sort of après…”
“Yeah, and don’t you wish you hadn’t?” said Zaphod, “Ford?”
“I said it was odd.”
“Yeah, shrewd but dull, perhaps it was—”
“Perhaps,” interrupted the green blur who had by this time resolved into the shape of a small wizened darksuited green waiter, “perhaps you would care to discuss the matter