“Having fun: This is the big section. It is impossible to have more fun without electrocuting your pleasure centres …”
Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked “Mode Execute Ready” instead of the now old-fashioned “Access Standby” which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged “Off”.
This was a planet he had seen completely destroyed, seen with his own two eyes or rather, blinded as he had been by the hellish disruption of air and light, felt with his own two feet as the ground had started to pound at him like a hammer, bucking, roaring, gripped by tidal waves of energy pouring out of the loathsome yellow Vogon ships. And then at last, five seconds after the moment he had determined as being the last possible moment had already passed, the gently swinging nausea of dematerialization as he and Arthur Dent had been beamed up through the atmosphere like a sports broadcast.
There was no mistake, there couldn’t have been. The Earth had definitely been destroyed. Definitely, definitely. Boiled away into space.
And yet here – he activated the Guide again – was his own entry on how you would set about having a good time in Bournemouth, Dorset, England, which he had always prided himself on as being one of the most baroque pieces of invention he had ever delivered. He read it again and shook his head in sheer wonder.
Suddenly he realized what the answer to the problem was, and it was this, that something very weird was happening; and if something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted it to be happening to him.
He stashed the Guide back in his satchel and hurried out on to the street again.
Walking north he again passed a steel grey limousine parked by the kerbside, and from a nearby doorway he heard a soft voice saying, “It’s OK, honey, it’s really OK, you got to learn to feel good about it. Look at the way the whole economy is structured
…”
Ford grinned, detoured round the next block which was now in flames, found a police helicopter which was standing unattended in the street, broke into it, strapped himself in, crossed his fingers and sent it hurtling inexpertly into the sky.
He weaved terrifyingly up through the canyoned walls of the city, and once clear of them, hurtled through the black and red pall of smoke which hung permanently above it.
Ten minutes later, with all the copter’s sirens blaring and its rapid-fire cannon blasting at random into the clouds, Ford Prefect brought it careering down among the gantries and landing lights at Han Dold spaceport, where it settled like a gigantic, startled and very noisy gnat.
Since he hadn’t damaged it too much he was able to trade it in for a first class ticket on the next ship leaving the system, and settled into one of its huge, voluptuous body-hugging seats.
This was going to be fun, he thought to himself, as the ship blinked silently across the insane distances of deep space and the cabin service got into its full extravagant swing.
“Yes please,” he said to the cabin attendants whenever they glided up to offer him anything at all.
He smiled with a curious kind of manic joy as he flipped again through the mysteriously re-instated entry on the planet Earth. He had a major piece of unfinished business that he would now be able to attend to, and was terribly pleased that life had suddenly furnished him with a serious goal to achieve.
It suddenly occurred to him to wonder where Arthur Dent was, and if he knew.
Arthur Dent was one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven light years away in a Saab, and anxious.
Behind him in the backseat was a girl who had made him crack his head on the door as he climbed in. He didn’t know if it was just because she was the first female of his own species that he had laid eyes on in years, or what it was, but he felt stupefied with, with … This is absurd, he told himself. Calm down, he told himself. You are not, he continued to himself in the firmest internal voice he could muster, in a fit and rational state. You have just hitch-hiked over a hundred thousand light years across the galaxy, you are very tired, a little confused and extremely vulnerable. Relax, don’t panic, concentrate on breathing deeply.