“Oh … er, really?” said Arthur, who was beginning to find the man’s curious, kindly manner disconcerting.

“Oh yes,” said the old man and simply stopped talking again.

“Ah,” said Arthur, “er …” He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman’s husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.

“You seem ill at ease,” said the old man with polite concern.

“Er, no … well, yes. Actually, you see, we weren’t really expecting to find anybody about in fact. I sort of gathered that you were all dead or something …”

“Dead?” said the old man. “Good gracious me, no, we have but slept.”

“Slept?” said Arthur incredulously.

“Yes, through the economic recession, you see,” said the old man, apparently unconcerned about whether Arthur understood a word he was talking about or not.

Arthur had to prompt him again.

“Er, economic recession?”

“Well, you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-built planets are something of a luxury commodity, you see …”

He paused and looked at Arthur.

“You know we built planets, do you?” he asked solemnly.

“Well, yes,” said Arthur, “I’d sort of gathered …”

“Fascinating trade,” said the old man, and a wistful look came into his eyes, “doing the coastlines was always my favorite. Used to have endless fun doing the little bits in fjords … so anyway,” he said, trying to find his thread again, “the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over.”

The man stifled a very slight yawn and continued.

“The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.”

Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.

“That’s a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” asked the old man mildly. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of touch.”

He pointed down into the crater.

“Is that robot yours?” he said.

“No,” came a thin metallic voice from the crater, “I’m mine.”

“If you’d call it a robot,” muttered Arthur. “It’s more a sort of electronic sulking machine.”

“Bring it,” said the old man. Arthur was quite surprised to hear a note of decision suddenly present in the old man’s voice. He called to Marvin, who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which he wasn’t.

“On second thoughts,” said the old man, “leave it here. You must come with me. Great things are afoot.” He turned toward his craft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly toward them through the dark.

Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater again muttering sour nothings to himself.

“Come,” called the old man, “come now or you will be late.”

“Late?” said Arthur. “What for?”

“What is your name, human?”

“Dent. Arthur Dent,” said Arthur.

“Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent,” said the old man, sternly. “It’s a sort of threat, you see.” Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes. “I’ve never been very good at them myself, but I’m told they can be very effective.”

Arthur blinked at him.

“What an extraordinary person,” he muttered to himself.

“I beg your pardon?” said the old man.

“Oh, nothing, I’m sorry,” said Arthur in embarrassment. “All right, where do we go?”

“In my aircar,” said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them. “We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber. Magrathea awakes.”

Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the old man. The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky, quite unsettled him.

He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow of tiny lights on the instrument panel.

“Excuse me,” he said to him, “what is your name, by the way?”

“My name?” said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again. He paused. “My name,” he said, “is Slartibartfast.”

Arthur practically choked.

“I beg your pardon?” he spluttered.

“Slartibartfast,” repeated the old man quietly.

“Slartibartfast?”

The old man looked at him gravely.

“I said it wasn’t important,” he said.

The aircar sailed through the night.

Chapter 23

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.

Chapter 24

Silently the aircar coasted through the cold darkness, a single soft glow of light that was utterly alone in the deep Magrathean night. It sped swiftly. Arthur’s companion seemed sunk in his own thoughts, and when Arthur tried on a couple of occasions to engage him in conversation again he would simply reply by asking if he was comfortable enough, and then left it at that.

Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were traveling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could almost believe they were hardly moving at all.

Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was traveling toward them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the aircar dipped sharply and headed downward in what seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what had happened.

They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed had been their own, relative to the glow of light which was a stationary hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The insane blur of silver was the circular wall of the tunnel down which they were shooting, apparently at several hundred miles an hour.