The thing he realised about the windows was this: because they had been converted into openable windows after they had first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows in the first place.
Hey ho, it’s a funny old life, he was just thinking to himself, when he suddenly realised that the room he had gone to all this trouble to break into was not a very interesting one.
He stopped in surprise.
Where was the strange flapping shape? Where was anything that was worth all this palaver – the extraordinary veil of secrecy that seemed to lie over this room and the equally extraordinary sequence of events that had seemed to conspire to get him into it?
The room, like every other room in this building now, was done out in some appallingly tasteful grey. There were a few charts and drawings on the wall. Most of them were meaningless to Ford, but then he came across something that was obviously a mock-up for a poster of some kind.
There was a kind of bird-like logo on it, and a slogan which said `The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mk II: the single most astounding thing of any kind ever. Coming soon to a dimension near you.’ No more information than that.
Ford looked around again. Then his attention was gradually drawn to Colin, the absurdly over-happy security robot, who was cowering in a corner of the room gibbering with what seemed strangely like fear.
Odd, thought Ford. He looked around to see what it was that Colin might have been reacting to. Then he saw something that he hadn’t noticed before, lying quietly on top of a work bench.
It was circular and black and about the size of a small side plate. Its top and its bottom were smoothly convex so that it resembled a small lightweight throwing discus.
Its surfaces seemed to be completely smooth, unbroken and featureless.
It was doing nothing.
Then Ford noticed that there was something written on it. Strange. There hadn’t been anything written on it a moment ago and now suddenly there was. There just didn’t seem to have been any observable transition between the two states.
All it said, in small, alarming letters was a single word:
\begin{center} PANIC
\end{center} A moment ago there hadn’t been any marks or cracks in its surface. Now there were. They were growing.
Panic, the Guide Mk II said. Ford begin to do as he was told. He had just remembered why the slug-like creatures looked familiar. Their colour scheme was a kind of corporate grey, but in all other respects they looked exactly like Vogons.
13
The ship dropped quietly to land on the edge of the wide clearing, a hundred yards or so from the village.
It arrived suddenly and unexpectedly but with a minimum of fuss. One moment it was a perfectly ordinary late afternoon in the early autumn – the leaves were just beginning to turn red and gold, the river was beginning to swell again with the rains from the mountains in the north, the plumage of the pikka birds was begin- ning to thicken in anticipation of the coming winter frosts, any day now the Perfectly Normal Beasts would start their thunderous migration across the plains, and Old Thrashbarg was beginning to mutter to himself as he hobbled his way around the village, a muttering which meant that he was rehearsing and elaborating the stories that he would tell of the past year once the evenings had drawn in and people had no choice but to gather round the fire and listen to him and grumble and say that that wasn’t how they remembered it – and the next moment there was a spaceship sitting there, gleaming in the warm autumn sun.
It hummed for a bit and then stopped.
It wasn’t a big spaceship. If the villagers had been experts on spaceships they would have known at once that it was a pretty nifty one, a small sleek Hrundi four-berth runabout with just about every optional extra in the brochure except Advanced Vectoid Stabilisis, which only wimps went for. You can’t get a good tight, sharp curve round a tri-lateral time axis with Advanced Vectoid Stabilisis. All right, it’s a bit safer, but it makes the handling go all soggy.