Arthur gaped.

“But aren’t they…”

“Yes,” said Trillian, “they are the mice I brought with me from the Earth.”

She looked him in the eye and Arthur thought he detected the tiniest resigned shrug.

“Could you pass me that bowl of grated Arcturan Megadonkey?” she said.

Slartibartfast coughed politely.

“Er, excuse me,” he said.

“Yes, thank you Slartibartfast,” said Benji mouse sharply, “you may go.”

“What? Oh… er, very well,” said the old man, slightly taken aback, “I’ll just go and get on with some of my fjords then.”

“Ah, well in fact that won’t be necessary,” said Frankie mouse. “It looks very much as if we won’t be needing the new Earth any longer.” He swivelled his pink little eyes. “Not now that we have found a native of the planet who was there seconds before it was destroyed.”

“What?” cried Slartibartfast, aghast. “You can’t mean that! I’ve got a thousand glaciers poised and ready to roll over Africa!”

“Well perhaps you can take a quick skiing holiday before you dismantle them,” said Frankie, acidly.

“Skiing holiday!” cried the old man. “Those glaciers are works of art! Elegantly sculptured contours, soaring pinnacles of ice, deep majestic ravines! It would be sacrilege to go skiing on high art!”

“Thank you Slartibartfast,” said Benji firmly. “That will be all.”

“Yes sir,” said the old man coldly, “thank you very much. Well, goodbye Earthman,” he said to Arthur, “hope the lifestyle comes together.”

With a brief nod to the rest of the company he turned and walked sadly out of the room.

Arthur stared after him not knowing what to say.

“Now,” said Benji mouse, “to business.”

Ford and Zaphod clinked their glasses together.

“To business!” they said.

“I beg your pardon?” said Benji.

Ford looked round.

“Sorry, I thought you were proposing a toast,” he said.

The two mice scuttled impatiently around in their glass transports. Finally they composed themselves, and Benji moved forward to address Arthur.

“Now, Earth creature,” he said, “the situation we have in effect is this. We have, as you know, been more or less running your planet for the last ten million years in order to find this wretched thing called the Ultimate Question.”

“Why?” said Arthur, sharply.

“No—we already thought of that one,” said Frankie interrupting, “but it doesn’t fit the answer. Why? Forty-Two… you see, it doesn’t work.”

“No,” said Arthur, “I mean why have you been doing it?”

“Oh, I see,” said Frankie. “Well, eventually just habit I think, to be brutally honest. And this is more or less the point—we’re sick to the teeth with the whole thing, and the prospect of doing it all over again on account of those whinnet-ridden Vogons quite frankly gives me the screaming heeby jeebies, you know what I mean? It was by the merest lucky chance that Benji and I finished our particular job and left the planet early for a quick holiday, and have since manipulated our way back to Magrathea by the good offices of your friends.”

“Magrathea is a gateway back to our own dimension,” put in Benji.

“Since when,” continued his murine colleague, “we have had an offer of a quite enormously fat contract to do the 5D chat show and lecture circuit back in our own dimensional neck of the woods, and we’re very much inclined to take it.”

“I would, wouldn’t you Ford?” said Zaphod promptingly.

“Oh yes,” said Ford, “jump at it, like a shot.”

Arthur glanced at them, wondering what all this was leading up to.

“But we’ve got to have a product you see,” said Frankie, “I mean ideally we still need the Ultimate Question in some form or other.”

Zaphod leaned forward to Arthur.

“You see,” he said, “if they’re just sitting there in the studio looking very relaxed and, you know, just mentioning that they happen to know the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, and then eventually have to admit that in fact it’s Forty-two, then the show’s probably quite short. No follow-up, you see.”

“We have to have something that sounds good,” said Benji.

“Something that sounds good?” exclaimed Arthur. “An Ultimate Question that sounds good? From a couple of mice?”

The mice bristled.

“Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise,” said Frankie.

“But…” started Arthur, hopelessly.

“Hey, will you get this, Earthman,” interrupted Zaphod. “You are a last generation product of that computer matrix, right, and you were there right up to the moment your planet got the finger, yeah?”

“Er…”

“So your brain was an organic part of the penultimate configuration of the computer programme,” said Ford, rather lucidly he thought.

“Right?” said Zaphod.

“Well,” said Arthur doubtfully. He wasn’t aware of ever having felt an organic part of anything. He had always seen this as one of his problems.

“In other words,” said Benji, steering his curious little vehicle right over to Arthur, “there’s a good chance that the structure of the question is encoded in the structure of your brain—so we want to buy it off you.”

“What, the question?” said Arthur.

“Yes,” said Ford and Trillian.

“For lots of money,” said Zaphod.

“No, no,” said Frankie, “it’s the brain we want to buy.”

“What!”

“I thought you said you could just read his brain electronically,” protested Ford.

“Oh yes,” said Frankie, “but we’d have to get it out first. It’s got to be prepared.”

“Treated,” said Benji.

“Diced.”

“Thank you,” shouted Arthur, tipping up his chair and backing away from the table in horror.

“It could always be replaced,” said Benji reasonably, “if you think it’s important.”

“Yes, an electronic brain,” said Frankie, “a simple one would suffice.”

“A simple one!” wailed Arthur.

“Yeah,” said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, “you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? —who’d know the difference?”

“What?” cried Arthur, backing away still further.

“See what I mean?” said Zaphod and howled with pain because of something that Trillian did at that moment.

“I’d notice the difference,” said Arthur.

“No you wouldn’t,” said Frankie mouse, “you’d be programmed not to.”

Ford made for the door.

“Look, I’m sorry, mice old lads,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve got a deal.”

“I rather think we have to have a deal,” said the mice in chorus, all the charm vanishing from their piping little voices in an instant. With a tiny whining shriek their two glass transports lifted themselves off the table, and swung through the air towards Arthur, who stumbled further backwards into a blind corner, utterly unable to cope or think of anything.

Trillian grabbed him desperately by the arm and tried to drag him towards the door, which Ford and Zaphod were struggling to open, but Arthur was dead weight—he seemed hypnotized by the airborne rodents swooping towards him.

She screamed at him, but he just gaped.

With one more yank, Ford and Zaphod got the door open. On the other side of it was a small pack of rather ugly men who they could only assume were the heavy mob of Magrathea. Not only were they ugly themselves, but the medical equipment they carried with them was also far from pretty. They charged.

So—Arthur was about to have his head cut open, Trillian was unable to help him, and Ford and Zaphod were about to be set upon by several thugs a great deal heavier and more sharply armed than they were.