The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams [9]
* * *
“Family’s always embarrassing isn’t it?” said Ford to Zaphod as the smoke began to clear.
He paused, he looked about.
“Where’s Zaphod?” he said.
Arthur and Trillian looked about blankly. They were pale and shaken and didn’t know where Zaphod was.
“Marvin?” said Ford, “where’s Zaphod?”
A moment later he said:
“Where’s Marvin?”
The robot’s corner was empty.
The ship was utterly silent. It lay in thick black space. Occasionally it rocked and swayed. Every instrument was dead, every vision screen was dead. They consulted the computer. It said:
“I regret I have been temporarily closed to all communication. Meanwhile, here is some light music.”
They turned off the light music.
They searched every corner of the ship in increasing bewilderment and alarm. Everywhere was dead and silent. Nowhere was there any trace of Zaphod or of Marvin.
One of the last areas they checked was the small bay in which the Nutri-Matic machine was located.
On the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small tray, on which sat three bone china cups and saucers, a bone china jug of milk, a silver teapot full of the best tea Arthur had ever tasted and a small printed note saying “Wait.”
Chapter 5
Ursa Minor Beta is, some say, one of the most appalling places in the known Universe.
Although it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of Playbeing magazine headlined an article with the words “When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life,” the suicide rate there quadrupled overnight.
Not that there are any nights on Ursa Minor Beta.
It is a West zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious freak of topography consists almost entirely of subtropical coastline. By an equally suspicious freak of temporal relastatics, it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close.
No adequate explanation for this has been forthcoming from the dominant life forms on Ursa Minor Beta, who spend most of their time attempting to achieve spiritual enlightenment by running round swimming pools, and inviting Investigation Officials from the Galactic Geo-Temporal Control Board to “have a nice diurnal anomaly.”
There is only one city on Ursa Minor Beta, and that is only called a city because the swimming pools are slightly thicker on the ground there than elsewhere.
If you approach Light City by air—and there is no other way of approaching it, no roads, no port facilities—if you don’t fly they don’t want to see you in Light City—you will see why it has this name. Here the sun shines brightest of all, glittering on the swimming pools, shimmering on the white, palm-lined boulevards, glistening on the healthy bronzed specks moving up and down them, gleaming off the villas, the hazy airpads, the beach bars and so on.
Most particularly it shines on a building, a tall, beautiful building consisting of two thirty-story white towers connected by a bridge halfway up their length.
The building is the home of a book, and was built here on the proceeds of an extraordinary copyright lawsuit fought between the book’s editors and a breakfast cereal company.
The book is a guide book, a travel book.
It is one of the most remarkable, certainly the most successful, books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—more popular than Life Begins at Five Hundred and Fifty, better selling than The Big Bang Theory—A Personal View by Eccentrica Gallumbits (the tripled-breasted whore of Eroticon Six) and more controversial then Oolon Colluphid’s latest blockbusting title Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex but Have Been Forced to Find Out.
(And in many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, it has long supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository