The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams [8]
“But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn’t he, by changing my brain? Okay, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he got.
“Except this old self of mine tried to leave himself in control, leaving orders for me in the bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don’t want to know, and I don’t want to hear them. That’s my choice. I’m not going to be anybody’s puppet, particularly not my own.”
Zaphod banged on the console in fury, oblivious of the dumbfounded looks he was attracting.
“The old me is dead!” he raved. “Killed himself! The dead shouldn’t hang about trying to interfere with the living!”
“And yet you summon me up to help you out of a scrape,” said the ghost.
“Ah,” said Zaphod, sitting down again, “well that’s different, isn’t it?”
He grinned at Trillian weakly.
“Zaphod,” rasped the apparition, “I think the only reason I waste my breath on you is that being dead I don’t have any other use for it.”
“Okay,” said Zaphod, “why don’t you tell me what the big secret is. Try me.”
“Zaphod, you knew when you were President of the Galaxy, as did Yooden Vranx before you, that the President is nothing. A cipher. Somewhere in the shadows behind is another man, being, something, with ultimate power. That man, or being, or something, you must find—the man who controls this Galaxy, and—we suspect—others. Possibly the entire Universe.”
“Why?”
“Why?” exclaimed an astonished ghost. “Why? Look around you, lad, does it look to you as if it’s in very good hands?”
“It’s all right.”
The old ghost glowered at him.
“I will not argue with you. You will simply take this ship, this Improbability Drive ship, to where it is needed. You will do it. Don’t think you can escape your purpose. The Improbability Field controls you, you are in its grip. What’s this?”
He was standing tapping at one of the terminals of Eddie the Shipboard Computer. Zaphod told him.
“What’s it doing?”
“It is trying,” said Zaphod with wonderful restraint, “to make tea.”
“Good,” said his great-grandfather, “I approve of that. Now Zaphod,” he said, turning and wagging a finger at him, “I don’t know if you are really capable of succeeding in your job. I think you will not be able to avoid it. However, I am too long dead and too tired to care as much as I did. The principal reason I am helping you now is that I couldn’t bear the thought of you and your modern friends slouching about up here. Understood?”
“Yeah, thanks a bundle.”
“Oh, and Zaphod?”
“Er, yeah?”
“If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you’re in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner…”
“Yeah?”
“Please don’t hesitate to get lost.”
Within the space of one second, a bolt of light flashed from the wizened old ghost’s hands to the computer, the ghost vanished, the bridge filled with billowing smoke and the Heart of Gold leaped an unknown distance through the dimensions of time and space.
Chapter 4
Ten light-years away, Gag Halfrunt jacked up his smile by several notches. As he watched the picture on his vision screen, relayed across the sub-ether from the bridge of the Vogon ship, he saw the final shreds of the Heart of Gold’s force shield ripped away, and the ship itself vanish in a puff of smoke.
Good, he thought.
The end of the last stray survivors of the demolition he had ordered on the planet Earth, he thought.
The final end of this dangerous (to the psychiatric profession) and subversive (also to the psychiatric profession) experiment to find the Question to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, he thought.
There would be some celebration with his fellows tonight, and in the morning they would meet again their unhappy, bewildered and highly profitable