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By Root 686 0

of the atmosphere around the planet was subtly altered. The sun blazed less harshly in the summer, the cold bit less bitterly in the winter, pleasant rain fell more often and slowly the desert world of Kakrafoon became a paradise. Even the telepathic power with which the people of Kakrafoon had been cursed was permanently dispersed by the force of the explosion.

A spokesman for Disaster Area—the one who had had all the environmentalists shot—was later quoted as saying that it had been “a good gig.”

Many people spoke movingly of the healing powers of music. A few skeptical scientists examined the records of the events more closely, and claimed that they had discovered faint vestiges of a vast artificially induced Improbability Field drifting in from a nearby region of space.

Chapter 22

Arthur woke up and instantly regretted it. Hangovers he’d had, but never anything on this scale. This was it, this was the big one, this was the ultimate pits. Matter transference beams, he decided, were not as much fun as, say, a good solid kick in the head.

Being for the moment unwilling to move on account of a dull stomping throb he was experiencing, he lay a while and thought. The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth—when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the subether, 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, okay,

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.

… and so on. Another favorite song was much shorter:

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 spun around 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 to where