Tough. Look, there’s somewhere you can take us where we can have fun, I’m trying to think of it, we can get drunk and maybe listen to some extremely evil music. Hold on, I’ll look it up. He dug out his copy of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and tipped through those parts of the index primarily concerned with sex and drugs and rock and roll.
A curse has arisen from the mists of time, said Slartibartfast.
Yes, I expect so, said Ford. Hey, he said, lighting accidentally on one particular reference entry, Eccentrica Gallumbits, did you ever meet her? The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. Some people say her erogenous zones start some four miles from her actual body. Me, I disagree, I say five.
A curse, said Slartibartfast, which will engulf the Galaxy in fire and destruction, and possibly bring the Universe to a premature doom. I mean it, he added.
Sounds like a bad time, said Ford, with look I’ll be drunk enough not to notice. Here, he said, stabbing his finger at the screen of the Guide, would be a really wicked place to go, and I think we should. What do you say, Arthur? Stop mumbling mantras and pay attention. There’s important stuff you’re missing here.
Arthur pushed himself up from his couch and shook his head.
Where are we going? he said.
To confront an ancient night.
Can it, said Ford. Arthur, we are going out into the Galaxy to have some fun. Is that an idea you can cope with?
What’s Slartibartfast looking so anxious about? said Arthur.
Nothing, said Ford.
Doom, said Slartibartfast. Come, he added, with sudden authority, there is much I must show and tell you.
He walked towards a green wrought-iron spiral staircase set incomprehensibly in the middle of the flight deck and started to ascend. Arthur, with a frown, followed.
Ford slung the Guide sullenly back into his satchel.
My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, he muttered to himself, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.
Nevertheless, he stomped up the stairs behind them.
What they found upstairs was just stupid, or so it seemed, and Ford shook his head, buried his face in his hands and slumped against a pot plant, crushing it against the wall.
The central computational area, said Slartibartfast unperturbed, this is where every calculation affecting the ship in any way is performed. Yes I know what it looks like, but it is in fact a complex four-dimensional topographical map of a series of highly complex mathematical functions.
It looks like a joke, said Arthur.