“It’s all right,” Ford continued to bellow. “There’s nothing to see, it’s all over. None of this is actually happening.”

“Clear the way, please,” boomed a police megaphone from the back of the crowd. “There’s been a break-in, clear the way.”

“Breakthrough,” yelled Ford in competition. “A scientific breakthrough.”

“This is the police! Clear the way!”

“Scientific equipment! Clear the way!”

“Police! Let us through!”

“Walkmen!” yelled Ford, and pulled half a dozen miniature tape players from his pockets and tossed them into the crowd. The resulting seconds of utter confusion allowed them to get the supermarket cart to the edge of the ramp, and to haul it up onto the lip of it.

“Hold tight,” muttered Ford, and released a button on his Electronic Thumb. Beneath them, the huge ramp shuddered and began slowly to heave its way upward.

“OK, kids,” he said as the milling crowd dropped away beneath them and they started to lurch their way along the tilting ramp into the bowels of the ship, “looks like we’re on our way.”

Chapter 39

Arthur Dent was irritated to be continually wakened by the sound of gunfire.

Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was still managing to sleep fitfully, he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway that they had fashioned into a kind of bunk for themselves, slung himself down the access ladder, and prowled the corridors moodily.

They were claustrophobic and ill-lit. The lighting circuits buzzed annoyingly.

That wasn’t it, though.

He paused and leaned backward as a flying power drill flew past him down the dim corridor with a screech, occasionally clanging against the walls like a confused bee.

That wasn’t it either.

He clambered through a bulkhead door and found himself in a large corridor. Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he walked toward the other.

He came to an observation monitor let into the wall behind a plate of toughened but still badly scratched Plexiglas.

“Would you turn it down please?” he asked Ford Prefect who was crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video equipment he’d taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court Road, having first hurled a small brick through it, and also a heap of empty beer cans.

“Shhhh!” hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at the screen. He was watching The Magnificent Seven.

“Just a bit,” said Arthur.

“No!” shouted Ford. “We’re just getting to the good bit! Listen, I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion, everything, and this is the good bit!”

With a sigh and a headache, Arthur sat down beside him and watched the good bit. He listened to Ford’s whoops and yells and yeeehays as placidly as he could.

“Ford,” he said eventually, when it was all over, and Ford was hunting through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca, “how come, if … “

“This is the big one,” said Ford. “This is the one I came back for. Do you realize I never saw it all the way through? I always missed the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came. When they blew the place up I thought I’d never get to see it. Hey, what happened with all that anyway?”

“Just life,” said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.

“Oh, that again,” said Ford. “I thought it might be something like that. I prefer this stuff,” he said as Rick’s bar flickered onto the screen. “How come if what?”

“What?”

“You started to say, ‘how come if … ’ ”

“How come if you’re so rude about the Earth, that you … Oh, never mind, let’s just watch the movie.”

“Exactly,” said Ford.

Chapter 40

There remains little still to tell.

Beyond what used to be known as the Limitless Lightfields of Flanux until the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine were discovered lying behind them, lie the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine.

Within the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine lies the star named Zarss, around which orbits the planet Preliumtarn in which is the land of Sevorbeupstry, and it was to the land of Sevorbeupstry that Arthur and Fenchurch came at last, a little tired by the journey.

And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they came to the Great Red Plain of Rars, which was bounded on the south side by the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, on the farther side of which, according to the dying words of Prak, they would find in thirty-foot-high letters of fire God’s Final Message to His Creation.

According to Prak, if Arthur’s memory served him right, the place was guarded by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob, and so, after a manner, it proved to be. He was a little man in a strange hat and he sold them a ticket.

“Keep to the left, please,” he said, “keep to the left,” and hurried past them on a little scooter.

They realized they were not the first to pass that way, for the path that led around the left of the Great Red Plain was well worn and dotted with booths. At one they bought a box of fudge, which had been baked in an oven in a cave in the mountain, which was heated by the fire of the letters that formed God’s Final Message to His Creation. At another they bought some postcards. The letters had been blurred with an airbrush, “So as not to spoil the Big Surprise!” it said on the reverse.

“Do you know what the message is?” they asked the wizened little lady in the booth.

“Oh yes,” she piped cheerily, “oh yes!”

She waved them on.

Every twenty miles or so there was a little stone hut with showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain, and the Great Red Plain rippled in the heat.

“Is it possible,” asked Arthur at one of the larger booths, “to rent one of those little scooters? Like the one Lajestic Ventrawhatsit had?”

“The scooters,” said the little lady who was serving at the ice cream bar, “are not for the devout.”

“Oh well, that’s easy then,” said Fenchurch, “we’re not particularly devout. We’re just interested.”

“Then you must turn back now,” said the little lady severely, and when they demurred, sold them a couple of Final Message sun hats and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around each other on the Great Red Plain of Rars.

They drank a couple of sodas in the shade of the booth and then trudged out into the sun again.

“We’re running out of barrier cream,” said Fenchurch after a few more miles. “We can go to the next booth, or we can return to the previous one which is nearer, but means we have to retrace our steps.”

They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the heat haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on.

They then discovered that they were not only not the first to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making it now.

Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape was heaving itself wretchedly along the ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half limping, half crawling.

It was moving so slowly that before too long they caught the creature up and could see that it was made of worn, scarred, and twisted metal.

It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in the hot, dry dust.

“So much time,” it groaned, “oh, so much time. And pain as well, so much of that, and so much time to suffer in it, too. One or the other on its own I could probably manage. It’s the two together that really get me down. Oh, hello, you again.”

“Marvin?” said Arthur sharply, crouching down beside it. “Is that you?”

“You were always one,” groaned the aged husk of the robot, “for the superintelligent question, weren’t you?”

“What is it?” whispered Fenchurch in alarm, crouching behind Arthur, and grasping his arm.