“There’s an escape capsule,” he said, “that the crew were to use to
abandon ship before jettisoning it into the black hole,” he said. “I
think it would be good to know that it’s still there.” The other
official nodded and left without a word.
The first official quietly beckoned Zaphod in. The large dim yellow
lights glowed about twenty feet from them.
“The reason,” he said, quietly “why everything else in this ship is,
I maintain, safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No
one. At least no one that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that
mad or dangerous ring very deep alarm bells. People may be stupid but
they’re not that stupid.”
“By-products,” hissed Zaphod again, – he had to hiss in order that
his voice shouldn’t be heard to tremble – “of what.”
“Er, Designer People.”
“What?”
“The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were awarded a huge research
grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The
results were uniformly disastrous. All the “people” and “personalities”
turned out to be amalgams of characteristics which simply could not
co-exist in naturally occurring life forms. Most of them were just poor
pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous
because they didn’t ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk
through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no
one spotted the danger.
“The most dangerous of all were three identical ones – they were put
in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe.
They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they
are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is
nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be
allowed to do…”
Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As
his eyes became accustomed to the light he saw that the two lights
framed a third space where something was broken. Wet sticky patches
gleamed dully on the floor. Zaphod and the official walked cautiously
towards the lights. At that moment, four words came crashing into the
helmet headsets from the other official.
“The capsule has gone,” he said tersely.
“Trace it” snapped Zaphod’s companion. “Find exactly where it has
gone. We must know where it has gone!”
Zaphod slid aside a large ground glass door. Beyond it lay a tank
full of thick yellow liquid, and floating in it was a man, a kindly
looking man with lots of pleasant laugh lines round his face. He seemed
to be floating quite contentedly and smiling to himself.
Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The
planet towards which the escape capsule had headed had already been
identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
The kindly looking man in the tank seemed to be babbling gently to
himself, just as the co-pilot had been in his tank. Little yellow
bubbles beaded on the man’s lips. Zaphod found a small speaker by the
tank and turned it on. He heard the man babbling gently about a shining
city on a hill.
He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance
Administration issue instructions that the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
must be made “perfectly safe.”