… and so on. Another favorite song was much shorter:
Arthur felt the waves of pain slowly receding, though he was still aware of a dull stomping throb. Slowly, carefully, he stood up.
“Can you hear a dull stomping throb?” said Ford Prefect.
Arthur span round and wobbled uncertainly. Ford Prefect was approaching looking red eyed and pasty.
“Where are we?” gasped Arthur.
Ford looked around. They were standing in a long curving corridor which stretched out of sight in both directions. The outer steel wall—which was painted in that sickly shade of pale green which they use in schools, hospitals and mental asylums to keep the inmates subdued—curved over the tops of their heads where it met the inner perpendicular wall which, oddly enough was covered in dark brown hessian wall weave. The floor was of dark green ribbed rubber.
Ford moved over to a very thick dark transparent panel set in the outer wall. It was several layers deep, yet through it he could see pinpoints of distant stars.
“I think we’re in a spaceship of some kind,” he said.
Down the corridor came the sound of a dull stomping throb.
“Trillian?” called Arthur nervously, “Zaphod?”
Ford shrugged.
“Nowhere about,” he said, “I’ve looked. They could be anywhere. An unprogrammed teleport can throw you light years in any direction. Judging by the way I feel I should think we’ve travelled a very long way indeed.”
“How do you feel?”
“Bad.”
“Do you think they’re…”
“Where they are, how they are, there’s no way we can know and no way we can do anything about it. Do what I do.”
“What?”
“Don’t think about it.”
Arthur turned this thought over in his mind, reluctantly saw the wisdom of it, tucked it up and put it away. He took a deep breath.
“Footsteps!” exclaimed Ford suddenly.
“Where?”
“That noise. That stomping throb. Pounding feet. Listen!”
Arthur listened. The noise echoed round the corridor at them from an indeterminate distance. It was the muffled sound of pounding footsteps, and it was noticeably louder.
“Let’s move,” said Ford sharply. They both moved—in opposite directions.
“Not that way,” said Ford, “that’s where they’re coming from.”
“No it’s not,” said Arthur, “They’re coming from that way.”
“They’re not, they’re…”
They both stopped. They both turned. They both listened intently. They both agreed with each other. They both set off into opposite directions again.
Fear gripped them.
From both directions the noise was getting louder.
A few yards to their left another corridor ran at right angles to the inner wall. They ran to it and hurried along it. It was dark, immensely long and, as they passed down it, gave them the impression that it was getting colder and colder. Other corridors gave off it to the left and right, each very dark and each subjecting them to sharp blasts of icy air as they passed.
They stopped for a moment in alarm. The further down the corridor they went, the louder became the sound of pounding feet.
They pressed themselves back against the cold wall and listened furiously. The cold, the dark and the drumming of disembodied feet was getting to them badly. Ford shivered, partly with the cold, but partly with the memory of stories his favourite mother used to tell him when he was a mere slip of a Betelgeusian, ankle high to an Arcturan Megagrasshopper: stories of dead ships, haunted hulks that roamed restlessly round the obscurer regions of deep space infested with demons or the ghosts of forgotten crews; stories too of incautious travellers who found and entered such ships; stories of— Then Ford remembered the brown hessian wall weave in the first corridor and pulled himself together. However ghosts and demons may choose to decorate their death hulks, he thought to himself, he would lay any money you liked it wasn’t with hessian wall weave. He grasped Arthur by the arm.
“Back the way we came,” he said firmly and they started to retrace their steps.
A moment later they leapt like startled lizards down the nearest corridor junction as the owners of the drumming feet suddenly hove into view directly in front of them.
Hidden behind the corner they goggled in amazement as about two dozen overweight men and women pounded past them in track suits panting and wheezing in a manner that would make a heart surgeon gibber.
Ford Prefect stared after them.
“Joggers!” he hissed, as the sound of their feet echoed away up and down the network of corridors.
“Joggers?” whispered Arthur Dent.
“Joggers,” said Ford Prefect with a shrug.
The corridor they were concealed in was not like the others. It was very short, and ended at a large steel door. Ford examined it, discovered the opening mechanism and pushed it wide.
The first thing that hit their eyes was what appeared to be a coffin.
And the next four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine things that hit their eyes were also coffins.
Chapter 23
The vault was low ceilinged, dimly lit and gigantic. At the far end, about three hundred yards away an archway let through to what appeared to be a similar chamber, similarly occupied.
Ford Prefect let out a low whistle as he stepped down on to the floor of the vault.
“Wild,” he said.
“What’s so great about dead people?” asked Arthur, nervously stepping down after him.
“Dunno,” said Ford, “Let’s find out, shall we?”
On closer inspection the coffins seemed to be more like sarcophagi. They stood about waist high and were constructed of what appeared to be white marble, which is almost certainly what it was—something that only appeared to be white marble. The tops were semi-translucent, and through them could dimly be perceived the features of their late and presumably lamented occupants. They were humanoid, and had clearly left the troubles of whatever world it was they came from far behind them, but beyond that little else could be discerned.
Rolling slowly round the floor between the sarcophagi was a heavy, oily white gas which Arthur at first thought might be there to give the place a little atmosphere until he discovered that it also froze his ankles. The sarcophagi too were intensely cold to the touch.
Ford suddenly crouched down beside one of them. He pulled a corner of his towel out of his satchel and started to rub furiously at something.
“Look, there’s a plaque on this one,” he explained to Arthur, “It’s frosted over.”
He rubbed the frost clear and examined the engraved characters. To Arthur they looked like the footprints of a spider that had had one too many of whatever it is that spiders have on a night out, but Ford instantly recognized an early form of Galactic Eezeereed.
“It says ‘Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B, Hold Seven, Telephone Sanitizer Second Class’—and a serial number.”
“A telephone sanitizer?” said Arthur, “a dead telephone sanitizer?”
“Best kind.”
“But what’s he doing here?”
Ford peered through the top at the figure within.
“Not a lot,” he said, and suddenly flashed one of those grins of his which always made people think he’d been overdoing things recently and should try to get some rest.
He scampered over to another sarcophagus. A moment’s brisk towel work and he announced: