Found it, he said. We can lose all this rubbish. Just don’t nod, that’s all.
Now, let us bow our heads in payment, intoned the voice, and then said it again, much faster and backwards.
Lights came and went, the pillars disappeared, the man gabled himself backwards into nothing, the Universe snappily reassembled itself around them.
You get the gist? said Slartibartfast.
I’m astonished, said Arthur, and bewildered.
I was asleep, said Ford, who floated into view at this point. Did I miss anything?
They found themselves once again teetering rather rapidly on the edge of an agonizingly high cliff. The wind whipped out from their faces and across a bay on which the remains of one of the greatest and most powerful space battle-fleets ever assembled in the Galaxy was briskly burning itself back into existence. The sky was a sullen pink, darkening via a rather curious colour to blue and upwards to black. Smoke billowed down out of it at an incredible lick. Events were now passing back by them almost too quickly to be distinguished, and when, a short while later, a huge star-battleship rushed away from them as if they’d said “boo”, they only just recognized it as the point at which they had come in.
But now things were too rapid, a video-tactile blur which brushed and jiggled them through centuries of galactic history, turning, twisting, flickering. The sound was a mere thin thrill.
Periodically through the thickening jumble of events they sensed appalling catastrophes, deep horrors, cataclysmic shocks, and these were always associated with certain recurring images, the only images which ever stood out clearly from the avalanche of tumbling history: a wicket gate, a small hard red ball, hard white robots, and also something less distinct, something dark and cloudy.
But there was also another sensation which rose clearly out of the thrilling passage of time.
Just as a slow series of clicks when speeded up will lose the definition of each individual click and gradually take on the quality of a sustained and rising tone, so a series of individual impressions here took on the quality of a sustained emotion and yet not an emotion. If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not as a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.
And just as a rising tone will change in character and take on harmonics as it rises, so again, this emotionless emotion seemed to rise to an unbearable if unheard scream and suddenly seemed to be a scream of guilt and failure.
And suddenly it stopped.