Chapter 30
And the Vogons came and destroyed it five minutes before the program was completed, added Arthur, not unbitterly.
Yes, said the old man, pausing to gaze hopelessly round the room. Ten million years of planning and work gone just like that. Ten million years, Earthman can you conceive of that kind of time span? A galactic civilization could grow from a single worm five times over in that time. Gone. He paused.
Well thats bureaucracy for you, he added.
You know, said Arthur thoughtfully, all this explains a lot of things. All through my life Ive had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.
No, said the old man, thats just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.
Everyone? said Arthur. Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know
Maybe. Who cares? said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. Perhaps Im old and tired, he continued, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.
He rummaged around in a pile of debris and pulled out a large perspex block with his name on it and a model of Norway moulded into it.
Wheres the sense in that? he said. None that Ive been able to make out. Ive been doing fjords in all my life. For a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award.
He turned it over in his hands with a shrug and tossed it aside carelessly, but not so carelessly that it didnt land on something soft.
In this replacement Earth were building theyve given me Africa to do and of course Im doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and Im old fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me its not equatorial enough. Equatorial! He gave a hollow laugh. What does it matter? Science has
achieved some wonderful things of course, but Id far rather be happy than right any day.
And are you?
No. Thats where it all falls down of course.
Pity, said Arthur with sympathy. It sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise.
Somewhere on the wall a small white light flashed.
Come, said Slartibartfast, you are to meet the mice. Your arrival on the planet has caused considerable excitement. It has already been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable event in the history of the Universe.
What were the first two?
Oh, probably just coincidences, said Slartibartfast carelessly. He opened the door and stood waiting for Arthur to follow.
Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at the sweaty dishevelled clothes he had been lying in the mud in on Thursday morning.
I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle, he muttered to himself.
I beg your pardon? said the old man mildly.
Oh nothing, said Arthur, only joking.
Chapter 31
For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle, a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vlhurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the GGugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.
Unfortunately, in the Vlhurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxynow positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came acrosswhich happened to be the Earthwhere due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.