crash?” said the owner of the two remaining heads. “Hey,” he put up two
of his hands, “I’m only asking.”
The two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance
Administration responded to this with a very cold stare, but the man
with the odd, or rather the even number of heads, missed it. He flung
himself back on the pilot couch, opened a couple of beers – one for
himself and the other also for himself – stuck his feet on the console
and said “Hey, baby” through the ultra-glass at a passing fish.
“Mr. Beeblebrox…,” began the shorter and less reassuring of the two
officials in a low voice.
“Yup?” said Zaphod, rapping a suddenly empty can down on some of the
more sensitive instruments, “you ready to dive? Let’s go.”
“Mr. Beeblebrox, let us make one thing perfectly clear…”
“Yeah let’s,” said Zaphod, “How about this for a start. Why don’t you
just tell me what’s really on this ship.”
“We have told you,” said the official. “By-products.”
Zaphod exchanged weary glances with himself.
“By-products,” he said. “By-products of what?”
“Processes.” said the official.
“What processes?”
“Processes that are perfectly safe.”
“Santa Zarquana Voostra!” exclaimed both of Zaphod’s heads in chorus,
“so safe that you have to build a zarking fortress ship to take the
by-products to the nearest black hole and tip them in! Only it doesn’t
get there because the pilot does a detour – is this right? – to pick up
some lobster…? OK, so the guy is cool, but… I mean own up, this is
barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical
mass, this is… this is… total vocabulary failure!”
“Shut up!” his right head yelled at his left, “we’re flanging!”
He got a good calming grip on the remaining beer can.
“Listen guys,” he resumed after a moment’s peace and contemplation.
The two officials had said nothing. Conversation at this level was not
something to which they felt they could aspire. “I just want to know,”
insisted Zaphod, “what you’re getting me into here.”
He stabbed a finger at the intermittent readings trickling over the
computer screen. They meant nothing to him but he didn’t like the look
of them at all. They were all squiggly with lots of long numbers and
things.
“It’s breaking up, is that it?” he shouted. “It’s got a hold full
epsilonic radiating aorist rods or something that’ll fry this whole
space sector for zillions of years back and it’s breaking up. Is that
the story? Is that what we’re going down to find? Am I going to come out
of that wreck with even more heads?”
“It cannot possibly be a wreck, Mr. Beeblebrox,” insisted the
official, “the ship is guaranteed to be perfectly safe. It cannot
possibly break up”
“Then why are you so keen to go and look at it?”
“We like to look at things that are perfectly safe.”
“Freeeooow!”
“Mr. Beeblebrox,” said on official, patiently, “may I remind you that
you have a job to do?”
“Yeah, well maybe I don’t feel so keen on doing it all of a sudden.
What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are
they called, those moral things?”
“Scruples?”
“Scruples, thank you, whatsoever? Well?”
The two officials waited calmly. They coughed slightly to help pass
the time. Zaphod sighed a “what is the world coming to” sort of sigh to
absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat.
“Ship?” he called.
“Yup?” said the ship.
“Do what I do.”
The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after
double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began
slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the
lowest depths.
Five hundred feet.
A thousand.
Two thousand.
Here, at a pressure or nearly seventy atmospheres, in the chilling
depths where no light reaches, nature keeps its most heated imaginings.
Two foot long nightmares loomed wildly into the bleaching light, yawned,
and vanished back into the blackness.
Two and a half thousand feet.
At the dim edges of the ship’s lights guilty secrets flitted by with
their eyes on stalks.