“Yeah, yeah,” sympathized Zaphod hardly at all.

“But I’m quite used to being humiliated,” droned Marvin, “I can even go and stick my head in a bucket of water if you like. Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water? I’ve got one ready. Wait a minute.”

“Er, hey, Marvin …” interrupted Zaphod, but it was too late. Sad little clunks and gurgles came up the line.

“What’s he saying?” asked Trillian.

“Nothing,” said Zaphod, “he just phoned up to wash his head at us.”

“There,” said Marvin, coming back on the line and bubbling a bit, “I hope that gave satisfaction.…”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Zaphod, “now will you please tell us where you are?”

“I’m in the parking lot,” said Marvin.

“The parking lot?” said Zaphod. “What are you doing there?”

“Parking cars, what else does one do/in a parking lot?”

“Okay, hang in there, we’ll be right down.”

In one movement Zaphod leaped to his feet, threw down the phone and wrote “Hotblack Desiato” on the bill.

“Come on, guys,” he said, “Marvin’s in the parking lot. Let’s get on down.”

“What’s he doing in the parking lot?” asked Arthur.

“Parking cars, what else? Dum dum.”

“But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.”

“I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish,” said Zaphod, “nothing but a gnab gib.”

“A what?”

“Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let’s get zappy.”

Few of the other diners paid them any attention as they weaved their way through the Restaurant to the exit. Their eyes were riveted on the horror of the skies.

“An interesting effect to watch for,” Max was telling them, “is in the upper left-hand quadrant of the sky, where if you look very carefully you can see the star system Hastromil boiling away into the ultraviolet. Anyone here from Hastromil?”

There were one or two slightly hesitant cheers from somewhere at the back.

“Well,” said Max beaming cheerfully at them, “it’s too late to worry about whether you left the gas on now.”

Chapter 18

The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it.

Zaphod grasped him firmly by the arm and maneuvered him into a cubicle standing to one side of the entrance hall.

“What are you doing to him?” asked Arthur.

“Sobering him up,” said Zaphod and pushed a coin into a slot. Lights flashed, gases swirled.

“Hi,” said Ford stepping out a moment later, “where are we going?”

“Down to the parking lot, come on.”

“What about the personnel Time Teleports?” said Ford. “Get us straight back to the Heart of Gold.”

“Yeah, but I’ve cooled on that ship. Zarniwoop can have it. I don’t want to play his games. Let’s see what we can find.”

A Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter took them down deep into the substrata beneath the Restaurant. They were glad to see it had been vandalized and didn’t try to make them happy as well as take them down.

At the bottom of the shaft the elevator doors opened and a blast of cold stale air hit them.

The first thing they saw on leaving the elevator was a long concrete wall with over fifty doors in it offering lavatory facilities for all of fifty major life forms. Nevertheless, like every parking lot in the Galaxy throughout the entire history of parking lots, this parking lot smelled predominantly of impatience.

They turned a corner and found themselves on a moving catwalk that traversed a vast cavernous space that stretched off into the dim distance.

It was divided off into bays each of which contained a spaceship belonging to one of the diners upstairs, some smallish and utilitarian mass production models, others vast shining limoships, the playthings of the very rich.

Zaphod’s eyes sparkled with something that may or may not have been avarice as he passed over them. In fact it’s best to be clear on this point — avarice is definitely what it was.

“There he is,” said Trillian. “Marvin, down there.”

They looked where she was pointing. Dimly they could see a small metal figure listlessly rubbing a small rag on one remote corner of a giant silver suncruiser.

At short intervals along the moving catwalk, wide transparent tubes led down to floor level. Zaphod stepped off the catwalk into one of these and floated gently downward. The others followed. Thinking back to this later, Arthur Dent thought it was the single most enjoyable experience of his travels in the Galaxy.

“Hey, Marvin,” said Zaphod, striding over toward to him. “Hey, kid, are we pleased to see you.”

Marvin turned, and insofar as it is possible for a totally inert metal face to look reproachful, this is what it did.

“No you’re not,” he said, “no one ever is.”

“Suit yourself,” said Zaphod and turned away to ogle the ships. Ford went with him.

Only Trillian and Arthur actually went up to Marvin.

“No, really we are,” said Trillian and patted him in a way that he disliked intensely, “hanging around waiting for us all this time.”

“Five hundred and seventy-six thousand million, three thousand five hundred and seventy-nine years,” said Marvin. “I counted them.”

“Well, here we are now,” said Trillian, feeling — quite correctly in Marvin’s view — that it was a slightly foolish thing to say.

“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

He paused just long enough to make them feel they ought to say something, and then interrupted.

“It’s the people you meet in this job that really get you down,” he said and paused again.

Trillian cleared her throat.

“Is that …

“The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,” continued Marvin.

Again the pause.

“Oh d—”

“And that was with a coffee machine.”

He waited.

“That’s a—”

“You don’t like talking to me do you?” said Marvin in a low desolate tone.

Trillian talked to Arthur instead.

Farther down the chamber Ford Prefect had found something of which he very much liked the look, several such things in fact.

“Zaphod,” he said in a quiet voice, “just look at some of these little star trolleys.…”

Zaphod looked and liked.

The craft they were looking at was in fact pretty small but extraordinary, and very much a rich kid’s toy. It was not much to look at. It resembled nothing so much as a paper dart about twenty feet long made of thin but tough metal foil. At the rear end was a small horizontal two-man cockpit. It had a tiny charm-drive engine, which was not capable of moving it at any great speed. The thing it did have, however, was a heat-sink.

The heat-sink had a mass of some two thousand billion tons and was contained within a black hole mounted in an electromagnetic field situated halfway along the length of the ship, and this heat-sink enabled the craft to be maneuvered to within a few miles of a yellow sun, there to catch and ride the solar flares that burst out from its surface.

Flare riding is one of the most exotic and exhilarating sports in existence, and those who can dare and afford to do it are among the most lionized men in the Galaxy. It is also of course stupefyingly dangerous — those who don’t die riding invariably die of sexual exhaustion at one of the Daedalus Club’s Après-Flare parties.

Ford and Zaphod looked and passed on.

“And this baby,” said Ford, “the tangerine star buggy with the black sunbusters …”

Again, the star buggy was a small ship — a totally misnamed one in fact, because the one thing it couldn’t manage was interstellar distances. Basically it was a sporty planet hopper dolled up to look like something it wasn’t. Nice lines though. They passed on.