The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy | Page 9

eyes waved
their way up to Ford. "I thought," he said, "that if the world was going to end we were meant
to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something." "If you like, yes," said Ford.
"That's what they told us in the army," said the man, and his eyes began
the long trek back down to his whisky. "Will that help?" asked the barman.
"No," said Ford and gave him a friendly smile. "Excuse me," he said,
"I've got to go." With a wave, he left.
The pub was silent for a moment longer, and then, embarrassingly enough,
the man with the raucous laugh did it again. The girl he had dragged along
to the pub with him had grown to loathe him dearly over the last hour or
so, and it would probably have been a great satisfaction to her to know that
in a minute and a half or so he would suddenly evaporate into a whi of
hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide. However, when the moment came
she would be too busy evaporating herself to notice it. The barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say: "Last orders,
please."
The huge yellow machines began to sink downward and to move faster.
Ford knew they were there. This wasn't the way he had wanted it.
Running up the lane, Arthur had nearly reached his house. He didn't
notice how cold it had suddenly become, he didn't notice the wind, he didn't
20

notice the sudden irrational squall of rain. He didn't notice anything but the
caterpillar bulldozers crawling over the rubble that had been his home. "You barbarians!" he yelled. "I'll sue the council for every penny it's got!
I'll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled . . . until
. . . until . . . until you've had enough." Ford was running after him very fast. Very very fast.
"And then I'll do it again!" yelled Arthur. "And when I've nished I will
take all the little bits, and I will jumpon them!"
Arthur didn't notice that the men were running from the bulldozers; he
didn't notice that Mr. Prosser was staring hectically into the sky. What
Mr. Prosser had noticed was that huge yellow somethings were screaming
through the clouds. Impossibly huge yellow somethings.
"And I will carry on jumping on them," yelled Arthur, still running, "until
I get blisters, or I can think of anything even more unpleasant to do, and
then . . . " Arthur tripped, and fell headlong, rolled and landed
at on his back. At
last he noticed that something was going on. His nger shot upwards. "What the hell's that?" he shrieked.
Whatever it was raced across the sky in monstrous yellowness, tore the
sky apart with mind-buggering noise and leapt o into the distance leaving
the gaping air to shut behind it with a bang that drove your ears six feet
into your skull. Another one followed and did the same thing only louder.
It's dicult to say exactly what the people on the surface of the planet
were doing now, because they didn't really know what they were doing them-
selves. None of it made a lot of sense running into houses, running out of
houses, howling noiselessly at the noise. All around the world city streets
exploded with people, cars slewed into each other as the noise fell on them
and then rolled o like a tidal wave over hills and valleys, deserts and oceans,
seeming to
atten everything it hit.
Only one man stood and watched the sky, stood with terrible sadness in
his eyes and rubber bungs in his ears. He knew exactly what was happening
and had known ever since his Sub-Etha Sens-OMatic had started winking in
the dead of night beside his pillar and woken him with a start. It was what
he had waited for all these years, but when he had deciphered the signal
pattern sitting alone in his small dark room a coldness had gripped him and
squeezed his heart. Of all the races in all of the Galaxy who could have come
and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, didn't it just have to be the
Vogons.
Still he knew what he had to do. As the Vogon craft screamed through the
air high above him he opened his satchel. He threw away a copy of Joseph and
21

the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat , he threw away a copy ofGodspell: He
wouldn't need them where he was going. Everything was ready, everything
was prepared.
He knew where his towel was.
A sudden silence hit the Earth. If anything it was worse than the noise.
For a while nothing happened. The great ships hung motionless in the air, over every nation on Earth.
Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against
nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encom-
pass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same
way that bricks don't.
And still nothing happened.
Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open