The Salmon of Doubt

He stabbed a finger at the intermittent readings trickling over the computer screen. They meant nothing to him but he didn’t like the look of them at all. They were all squiggly with lots of long numbers and things. “It’s breaking up, is that it?” he shouted. “It’s got a hold full epsilonic radiating aorist rods or something that’ll fry this whole space sector for zillions of years back and it’s breaking up. Is that the story? Is that what we’re going down to find? Am I going to come out of that wreck with even more heads?”

“It cannot possibly be a wreck, Mr. Beeblebrox,” insisted the official, “the ship is guaranteed to be perfectly safe. It cannot possibly break up” “Then why are you so keen to go and look at it?”

“We like to look at things that are perfectly safe.”

“Freeeooow!” “Mr. Beeblebrox,” said on official, patiently, “may I remind you that you have a job to do?”

“Yeah, well maybe I don’t feel so keen on doing it all of a sudden. What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those moral things?” “Scruples?”

“Scruples, thank you, whatsoever? Well?”

The two officials waited calmly. They coughed slightly to help pass the time. Zaphod sighed a “what is the world coming to” sort of sigh to absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat.

“Ship?” he called.

“Yup?” said the ship.

The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths. Five hundred feet.

A thousand.

Two thousand.

Here, at a pressure or nearly seventy atmospheres, in the chilling depths where no light reaches, nature keeps its most heated imaginings. Two foot long nightmares loomed wildly into the bleaching light, yawned, and vanished back into the blackness.

Two and a half thousand feet.

At the dim edges of the ship’s lights guilty secrets flitted by with their eyes on stalks.

Gradually the topography of the distantly approaching ocean bed resolved with greater and greater clarity on the computer displays until at last a shape could be made out that was separate and distinct from its surroundings. It was like a huge lopsided cylindrical fortress which widened sharply halfway along its length to accommodate the heavy ultra-plating with which the crucial storage holds were clad, and which were supposed by its builders to have made this the most secure and impregnable spaceship ever built. Before launch the material structure of this section had been battered, rammed, blasted and subjected to every assault its builders knew it could withstand in order to demonstrate that it could withstand them.

The tense silence in the cockpit tightened perceptibly as it became clear that it was this section that had broken rather neatly in two.

“In fact it’s perfectly safe,” said one of the officials, “it’s built so that even if the ship does break up, the storage holds cannot possibly be breached.” Three thousand, eight hundred and twenty five feet.

Four Hi-Presh-A SmartSuits moved slowly out of the open hatchway of the salvage craft and waded through the barrage of its lights towards the monstrous shape that loomed darkly out of the sea night.

They moved with a sort of clumsy grace, near weightless though weighed on by a world of water.

With his right-hand head Zaphod peered up into the black immensities above him and for a moment his mind sang with a silent roar of horror. He glanced to his left and was relieved to see that his other head was busy watching the Brockian Ultra-Cricket broadcasts on the helmet vid without concern. Slightly behind him to his left walked the two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration, slightly in front of him to his right walked the empty suit, carrying their implements and testing the way for them.

They passed the huge rift in the broken backed Starship Billion Year Bunker, and played their flashlights up into it. Mangled machinery loomed between torn and twisted bulkheads, two feet thick. A family of large transparent eels lived in there now and seemed to like it.

The empty suit preceded them along the length of the ship’s gigantic murky hull, trying the airlocks. The third one it tested ground open uneasily. They crowded inside it and waited for several long minutes while the pump mechanisms dealt with the hideous pressure that the ocean exerted, and slowly replaced it with an equally hideous pressure of air and inert gases. At last the inner door slid open and they were admitted to a dark outer holding area of the Starship Billion Year Bunker.