The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams [47]
Buried deep in concrete bunkers beneath the city of speakers lay the instruments that the musicians would control from their ship, the massive photon-ajuitar, the bass detonator and the Megabang drum complex.
It was going to be a noisy show.
Aboard the giant control ship, all was activity and bustle. Hotblack Desiato’s limoship, a mere tadpole beside it, had arrived and docked, and the lamented gentleman was being transported down the high vaulted corridors to meet the medium who was going to interpret his psychic impulses onto the ajuitar keyboard.
A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn’t a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.
Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light-years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
The band’s manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymbalistics would be right.
The sub-ether was buzzing with the communications of the stage technicians testing the speaker channels, and it was this that was being relayed to the interior of the black ship.
Its dazed occupants lay against the back wall of the cabin, and listened to the voices on the monitor speakers.
“Okay, channel nine on power,” said a voice, “testing channel fifteen….”
Another thumping crack of noise walloped through the ship.
“Channel fifteen A-okay,” said another voice.
A third voice cut in.
“The black stuntship is now in position,” it said, “it’s looking good. Gonna be a great sundive. Stage computer on line?”
A computer voice answered.
“On line,” it said
“Take control of the black ship.”
“Black ship locked into trajectory program, on standby.”
“Testing channel twenty.”
Zaphod leaped across the cabin and switched frequencies on the sub-ether receiver before the next mind-pulverizing noise hit them. He stood there quivering.
“What,” said Trillian in a small quiet voice, “does sundive mean?”
“It means,” said Marvin, “that the ship is going to dive into the sun. Sun…. Dive. It’s very simple to understand. What do you expect if you steal Hotblack Desiato’s stuntship?”
“How do you know,” said Zaphod in a voice that would make a Vegan snow lizard feel chilly, “that this is Hotblack Desiato’s stuntship?”
“Simple,” said Marvin. “I parked it for him.”
“Then why… didn’t… you… tell us!”
“You said you wanted excitement and adventure and really wild things.”
“This is awful,” said Arthur unnecessarily in the pause which followed.
“That’s what I said,” confirmed Marvin.
On a different frequency, the sub-ether receiver had picked up a public broadcast, which now echoed around the cabin.
“… fine weather for the concert here this afternoon. I’m standing here in front of the stage,” the reporter lied, “in the middle of the Rudlit Desert, and with the aid of hyperbinoptic glasses I can just about make out the huge audience cowering there on the horizon all around me. Behind me the speaker stacks rise like a sheer cliff face, and high above me the sun is shining away and doesn’t know what’s going to hit it. The environmentalist lobby do know what’s going to hit it, and they claim that the concert will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, irreparable damage to the atmosphere and all the usual things that environmentalists usually go on about.
“But I’ve just had a report that a representative