The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.

Chapter 11

The Improbability-proof control cabin of the Heart of Gold looked like a perfectly conventional spaceship except that it was perfectly clean because it was so new. Some of the control seats hadn’t had the plastic wrapping taken off yet. The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish restaurant. In fact it wasn’t perfectly oblong: the two long walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the angles and corners were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have got miserable. As it was the cabin looked excitingly purposeful, with large video screens ranged over the control and guidance system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers set into the convex wall. In one corner a robot sat humped, its gleaming brushed steel head hanging loosely between its gleaming brushed steel knees. It too was fairly new, but though it was beautifully constructed and polished it somehow looked as if the various parts of its more or less humanoid body didn’t quite fit properly. In fact they fitted perfectly well, but something in its bearing suggested that they might have fitted better.

Zaphod Beeblebrox paced nervously up and down the cabin, brushing his hands over pieces of gleaming equipment and giggling with excitement.

Trillian sat hunched over a clump of instruments reading off figures. Her voice was carried round the Tannoy system of the whole ship.

“Five to one against and falling…” she said, “four to one against and falling… three to one… two… one… probability factor of one to one… we have normality, I repeat we have normality.” She turned her microphone off—then turned it back on, with a slight smile and continued: “Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. Please relax. You will be sent for soon.”

Zaphod burst out in annoyance: “Who are they Trillian?”

Trillian span her seat round to face him and shrugged.

“Just a couple of guys we seem to have picked up in open space,” she said. “Section ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.”

“Yeah, well that’s a very sweet thought Trillian,” complained Zaphod, “but do you really think it’s wise under the circumstances? I mean, here we are on the run and everything, we must have the police of half the Galaxy after us by now, and we stop to pick up hitchhikers. OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?”

He tapped irritably at a control panel. Trillian quietly moved his hand before he tapped anything important. Whatever Zaphod’s qualities of mind might include—dash, bravado, conceit—he was mechanically inept and could easily blow the ship up with an extravagant gesture. Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason why he had had such a wild and successful life that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.

“Zaphod,” she said patiently, “they were floating unprotected in open space… you wouldn’t want them to have died would you?”

“Well, you know… no. Not as such, but…”

“Not as such? Not die as such? But?” Trillian cocked her head on one side.

“Well, maybe someone else might have picked them up later.”

“A second later and they would have been dead.”

“Yeah, so if you’d taken the trouble to think about the problem a bit longer it would have gone away.”

“You’d been happy to let them die?”

“Well, you know, not happy as such, but…”

“Anyway,” said Trillian, turning back to the controls, “I didn’t pick them up.”

“What do you mean? Who picked them up then?”

“The ship did.”

“Huh?”

“The ship did. All by itself.”

“Huh?”

“Whilst we were in Improbability Drive.”

“But that’s incredible.”

“No Zaphod. Just very very improbable.”

“Er, yeah.”

“Look Zaphod,” she said, patting his arm, “don’t worry about the aliens. They’re just a couple of guys I expect. I’ll send the robot down to get them and bring them up here. Hey Marvin!”

In the corner, the robot’s head swung up sharply, but then wobbled about imperceptibly. It pulled itself up to its feet as if it was about five pounds heavier that it actually was, and made what an outside observer would have thought was a heroic effort to cross the room. It stopped in front of Trillian and seemed to stare through her left shoulder.

“I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed,” it said. Its voice was low and hopeless.

“Oh God,” muttered Zaphod and slumped into a seat.

“Well,” said Trillian in a bright compassionate tone, “here’s something to occupy you and keep your mind off things.”

“It won’t work,” droned Marvin, “I have an exceptionally large mind.”

“Marvin!” warned Trillian.