It wasn't even the climax of the book, because there wasn't one. The character died about a third of the way through the penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were on Bartledan.
Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships, eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.
The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won't. That is not what 'accident' means. The acci– dent that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.
The ship's systems protested all the way down that everything was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and finally exploded into a seething ball of flame it became clear that this was not the case.
Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are now required to do by law. For a short while afterwards, other small fires flared up here and there as odd pieces of scattered debris exploded quietly in their own time. Then they too died away.
Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless inter– stellar flight, was the only one on board who had actually familiarised himself with the ship's safety procedures in case of an unscheduled landing, and was therefore the sole survivor. He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic cocoon with 'Have a nice day' printed in over three thousand different languages all over it.
Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta.
After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.
Chapter 12
Ford tumbled through the open air in a cloud of glass splinters and chair parts. Again, he hadn’t really thought things through, really, and was just playing it by ear, buying time. At times of major crisis he found it was often quite helpful to have his flash before his eyes. It gave him a chance to reflect on things, see things in some sort of perspective, and it sometimes furnished him with a vital clue as what to do next.
There was the ground rushing up to meet him at thirty feet per second, but he would, he thought, deal with that problem when he got to it. First things first.
Ah, here it came. His childhood. Humdrum stuff, he’d been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes, he knew all that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain. His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on, come on.
He was twisting and turning downward, the outside air at this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.
Early voyages to other planets. Oh, for Zark’s sake, this was like some sort of bloody travelog documentary before the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.
Ah!
Those were the days. They worked out a hut on the Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the Donqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful of highly sophisticated digital devices and most important thing a lot of dreams. No. Most important a lot of Fanallan rum. To be absolutely accurate, that Ol’ Janx Spirit was the absolute most important thing, then the Fanallan rum and also some of the beaches on the Atoll where the local girls would hang out, but the dreams were important as well. Whatever happened to those?
He couldn’t quite remember what the dreams were in fact, but they had seemed immensely important at the time. They had certainly not involved this huge towering office block he was now falling down the side of. All of that had come when some of the original team had started to settle down and get greedy, while he and others had stayed out in the field, researching and hitchhiking and gradually becoming more and more isolated from the corporate nightmare at the Guide had inexorably turned into, and the architectural monstrosity it had come to occupy. Where were the dreams in that? He thought of all the corporative lawyers who occupied half of the building, all the “operatives” who occupied the lower levels, and all the sub-editors and their secretaries and their secretaries’ lawyers and their secretaries, lawyers’ secretaries and, worst of all, the accountants and the marketing department.
He had half a mind just to keep on falling. The finger to the lot of them.
He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing about what color the Guide should be and exercising their infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event. If any of them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment, they would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping past them to his certain death and flicking V-signs at them.
Sixteenth floor. Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that copy of his they'd cut? Fifteen years of research he'd filed from one planet alone and they'd cut it to two words. 'Mostly Harmless.' V-signs to them as well.
Fifteenth floor. Logistical Administration, whatever that was about. They all had big cars. That, he thought, was what that was about.
Fourteenth floor. Personnel. He had a very shrewd suspicion that it was they who had engineered his fifteen-year exile while the Guide metamorphosed into the corporate monolith (or rather, duolith – mustn't forget the lawyers) it had become.
Thirteenth floor. Research and development.
Hang about.
Thirteenth floor.
He was having to think rather fast at the moment because the situation was becoming a little urgent.
He suddenly remembered the floor display panel in the eleva– tor. It hadn't had a thirteenth floor. He'd thought no more about it because, having spent fifteen years on the rather backward planet Earth where they were superstitious about the number thirteen, he was used to being in buildings that numbered their floors without it. No reason for that here, though.
The windows of the thirteenth floor, he could not help noticing as he flashed swiftly by them, were darkened.
What was going on in there? He started to remember all the stuff that Harl had been talking about. One, new, multi– dimensional Guide spread across an infinite number of universes. It had sounded, the way Harl had put it, like wild meaninglessness dreamed up by the marketing department with the backing of the accountants. If it was any more real than that then it was a very weird and dangerous idea. Was it real? What was going on behind the darkened windows of the sealed-off thirteenth floor?
Ford felt a rising sense of curiosity, and then a rising sense of panic. That was the complete list of rising feelings he had. In every other respect he was falling very rapidly. He really ought to turn his mind to wondering how he was going to get out of this situation alive.