The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams [54]
They entered.
To the eyes of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, the most remarkable thing about the ship’s bridge was not the fifty-foot diameter hemispherical dome which covered it, and through which the dazzling display of stars shone down on them: to people who have eaten at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, such wonders are commonplace. Nor was it the bewildering array of instruments that crowded the long circumferential wall around them. To Arthur this was exactly what spaceships were traditionally supposed to look like, and to Ford it looked thoroughly antiquated: it confirmed his suspicions that Disaster Area’s stuntship had taken them back at least a million, if not two million, years before their own time.
No, the thing that really caught them off balance was the bathtub.
The bathtub stood on a six-foot pedestal of rough-hewn blue water crystal and was of a baroque monstrosity not often seen outside the Maximegalon Museum of Diseased Imaginings. An intestinal jumble of plumbing had been picked out in gold leaf rather than decently buried at midnight in an unmarked grave; the taps and shower attachment would have made a gargoyle jump.
As the dominant centerpiece of a starship bridge it was terribly wrong, and it was with the embittered air of a man who knew this that Number Two approached it.
“Captain, sir!” he shouted through clenched teeth—a difficult trick but he’d had years during which to perfect it.
A large genial face and genial foam-covered arm popped up above the rim of the monstrous bath.
“Ah, hello, Number Two,” said the Captain, waving a cheery sponge, “having a nice day?”
Number Two snapped even further to attention than he already was.
“I have brought you the prisoners I located in freezer bay seven, sir!” he yapped.
Ford and Arthur coughed in confusion.
“Er… hello,” they said.
The Captain beamed at them. So Number Two had really found some prisoners. Well, good for him, thought the Captain, nice to see a chap doing what he’s best at.
“Oh, hello there,” he said to them. “Excuse me not getting up, just having a quick bath. Well, jynnan tonnyx all round then. Look in the fridge Number One.”
“Certainly, sir.”
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N-N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian “chinanto/mnigs” which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan “tzjin-anthony-ks” which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond that fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.
Number Two stood before the Captain’s bathtub trembling with frustration.
“Don’t you want to interrogate the prisoners, sir?” he squealed.
The Captain peered at him in bemusement.