Chapter 14
Four inert bodies sank through spinning blackness. Consciousness had died, cold oblivion pulled the bodies down and down into the pit of unbeing. The roar of silence echoed dismally around them and they sank at last into a dark and bitter sea of heaving red that slowly engulfed them, seemingly for ever.
After what seemed an eternity the sea receded and left them lying on a cold hard shore, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Cold spasms shook them, lights danced sickeningly around them. The cold hard shore tipped and span and then stood still. It shone darkly – it was a very highly polished cold hard shore.
A green blur watched them disapprovingly.
It coughed.
“Good evening, madam, gentlemen,” it said, “do you have a reservation?”
Ford Prefect’s consciousness snapped back like elastic, making his brain smart. He looked up woozily at the green blur.
“Reservation?” he said weakly. “Yes, sir,” said the green blur.
“Do you need a reservation for the afterlife?”
In so far as it is possible for a green blur to arch its eyebrows disdainfully, this is what the green blur now did.
“Afterlife, sir?” it said.
Arthur Dent was grappling with his consciousness the way one grapples with a lost bar of soap in the bath.
“Is this the afterlife?” he stammered.
“Well I assume so,” said Ford Prefect trying to work out which way was up. He tested the theory that it must lie in the opposite direction from the cold hard shore on which he was lying, and staggered to what he hoped were his feet.
“I mean,” he said, swaying gently, “there’s no way we could have survived that blast is there?”