The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic, equations used to engineer the Somebody Else’s Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon in this field.)
The baffling discrepancies that used to occur at this point remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously. They were at the time put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness, flashiness, tiredness, emotionality or the lateness of the hour, and completely forgotten about on the following morning. They were never tested under laboratory conditions, of course, because they never occurred in laboratories — not in reputable laboratories at least.
And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:
Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.
Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be understood. To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much like what the man in the street would have said “Oh, yes, I could have told you that.” Then some phrases like “Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks” were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it.
The small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street theater grant and went away.
Chapter 6
In space travel, you see,” said Slartibartfast, as he fiddled with some instruments in the room of Informational Illusions, “in space travel …”
He stopped and looked about him.
The room of Informational Illusions was a welcome relief after the visual monstrosities of the central computational area. There was nothing in it. No information, no illusions, just themselves, white walls and a few small instruments that looked as if they were meant to plug into something that Slartibartfast couldn’t find.
“Yes?” urged Arthur. He had picked up Slartibartfast’s sense of urgency but didn’t know what to do with it.
“Yes what?” said the old man.
“You were saying?”
Slartibartfast looked at him sharply.
“The numbers,” he said, “are awful.” He resumed his search.
Arthur nodded wisely to himself. After a while he realized that this wasn’t getting him anywhere and decided that he would say “What?” after all.
“In space travel,” repeated Slartibartfast, “all the numbers are awful.”
Arthur nodded again and looked around to Ford for help, but Ford was practicing being sullen and getting quite good at it.
“I was only,” said Slartibartfast with a sigh, “trying to save you the trouble of asking me why all the ship’s computations were being done on a waiter’s check pad.”
Arthur frowned.
“Why,” he said, “were all the ship’s computations being done on a wait—”
He stopped.
Slartibartfast said, “Because in space travel all the numbers are awful.”
He could tell that he wasn’t getting his point across.
“Listen,” he said, “on a waiter’s check pad numbers dance. You must have encountered the phenomenon.”
“Well …”
“On a waiter’s check pad,” said Slartibartfast, “reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible, within certain parameters.”
“What parameters?”
“It’s impossible to say,” said Slartibartfast. “That’s one of them. Strange but true. At least, I think it’s strange,” he added, “and I am assured that it’s true.”
At that moment he located the slot in the wall for which he had been searching, and clicked the instrument he was holding into it.
“Do not be alarmed,” he said, and then suddenly darted an alarmed look at it himself, and lunged back, “it’s …”
They didn’t hear what he said, because at that moment the ship winked out of existence around them and a star battleship the size of a small Midlands industrial city plunged out of the sundered night toward them, star lasers ablaze.
A nightmare storm of blistering light seared through the blackness and smacked a fair bit off the planet directly behind them.
They gaped, pop-eyed, and were unable to scream.
Chapter 7
Another world, another day, another dawn.
The early morning’s thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.
There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.
The moment passed as it regularly did on Sqornshellous Zeta, without incident.
The mist clung to the surface of the marshes. The swamp trees were gray with it, the tall reeds indistinct. It hung motionless like held breath.
Nothing moved.
There was silence.
The sun struggled feebly with the mist, tried to impart a little warmth here, shed a little light there, but clearly today was going to be just another long haul across the sky.
Nothing moved.
Again, silence.
Nothing moved.
Silence.
Nothing moved.
Very often on Sqornshellous Zeta, whole days would go on like this, and this was indeed going to be one of them.
Fourteen hours later the sun sank hopelessly beneath the opposite horizon with a sense of totally wasted effort.
And a few hours later it reappeared, squared its shoulders and started on up the sky again.
This time, however, something was happening. A mattress had just met a robot.
“Hello, robot,” said the mattress.
“Bleah,” said the robot and continued what it was doing, which was walking round very slowly in a very tiny circle.
“Happy?” said the mattress.
The robot stopped and looked at the mattress. It looked at it quizzically.
It was clearly a very stupid mattress. It looked back at him with wide eyes.
After what it had calculated to ten significant decimal places as being the precise length of pause most likely to convey a general contempt for all things mattressy, the robot continued to walk round in tight circles.