“Err… what?”
“I said we’ve met.”
Zaphod gave an awkward start of surprise and jabbed a gum sharply.
“Hey… er, have we? Hey… er…”
Ford rounded on Arthur with an angry flash in his eyes. Now he felt he was back on home ground he suddenly began to resent having lumbered himself with this ignorant primitive who knew as much about the affairs of the Galaxy as an Ilford-based gnat knew about life in Peking.
“What do you mean you’ve met?” he demanded. “This is Zaphod Beeblebrox from Betelgeuse Five you know, not bloody Martin Smith from Croydon.”
“I don’t care,” said Arthur coldly. We’ve met, haven’t we Zaphod Beeblebrox—or should I say… Phil?”
“What!” shouted Ford.
“You’ll have to remind me,” said Zaphod. “I’ve a terrible memory for species.”
“It was at a party,” pursued Arthur.
“Yeah, well I doubt that,” said Zaphod.
“Cool it will you Arthur!” demanded Ford.
Arthur would not be deterred. “A party six months ago. On Earth… England…”
Zaphod shook his head with a tight-lipped smile.
“London,” insisted Arthur, “Islington.”
“Oh,” said Zaphod with a guilty start, “that party.”
This wasn’t fair on Ford at all. He looked backwards and forwards between Arthur and Zaphod. “What?” he said to Zaphod. “You don’t mean to say you’ve been on that miserable planet as well do you?”
“No, of course not,” said Zaphod breezily. “Well, I may have just dropped in briefly, you know, on my way somewhere…”
“But I was stuck there for fifteen years!”
“Well I didn’t know that did I?”
“But what were you doing there?”
“Looking about, you know.”
“He gatecrashed a party,” persisted Arthur, trembling with anger, “a fancy dress party…”
“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” said Ford.
“At this party,” persisted Arthur, “was a girl… oh well, look it doesn’t matter now. The whole place has gone up in smoke anyway…”
“I wish you’d stop sulking about that bloody planet,” said Ford. “Who was the lady?”
“Oh just somebody. Well alright, I wasn’t doing very well with her. I’d been trying all evening. Hell, she was something though. Beautiful, charming, devastatingly intelligent, at last I’d got her to myself for a bit and was plying her with a bit of talk when this friend of yours barges up and says Hey doll, is this guy boring you? Why don’t you talk to me instead? I’m from a different planet.” I never saw her again.”
“Zaphod?” exclaimed Ford.
“Yes,” said Arthur, glaring at him and trying not to feel foolish. “He only had the two arms and the one head and he called himself Phil, but…”
“But you must admit he did turn out to be from another planet,” said Trillian wandering into sight at the other end of the bridge. She gave Arthur a pleasant smile which settled on him like a ton of bricks and then turned her attention to the ship’s controls again.
There was silence for a few seconds, and then out of the scrambled mess of Arthur’s brain crawled some words.
“Tricia McMillian?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Same as you,” she said, “I hitched a lift. After all with a degree in Maths and another in astrophysics what else was there to do? It was either that or the dole queue again on Monday.”
“Infinity minus one,” chattered the computer, “Improbability sum now complete.”
Zaphod looked about him, at Ford, at Arthur, and then at Trillian.
“Trillian,” he said, “is this sort of thing going to happen every time we use the Improbability drive?”
“Very probably, I’m afraid,” she said.
Chapter 14
The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill at ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious principle of physics—as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules.
As the ship’s artificial night closed in they were each grateful to retire to separate cabins and try to rationalize their thoughts.
Trillian couldn’t sleep. She sat on a couch and stared at a small cage which contained her last and only links with Earth—two white mice that she had insisted Zaphod let her bring. She had expected not to see the planet again, but she was disturbed by her negative reaction to the planet’s destruction. It seemed remote and unreal and she could find no thoughts to think about it. She watched the mice scurrying round the cage and running furiously in their little plastic treadwheels till they occupied her whole attention. Suddenly she shook herself and went back to the bridge to watch over the tiny flashing lights and figures that charted the ship’s progress through the void. She wished she knew what it was she was trying not to think about.
Zaphod couldn’t sleep. He also wished he knew what it was that he wouldn’t let himself think about. For as long as he could remember he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there. Most of the time he was able to put this thought aside and not worry about it, but it had been re-awakened by the sudden inexplicable arrival of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. Somehow it seemed to conform to a pattern that he couldn’t see.
Ford couldn’t sleep. He was too excited about being back on the road again. Fifteen years of virtual imprisonment were over, just as he was finally beginning to give up hope. Knocking about with Zaphod for a bit promised to be a lot of fun, though there seemed to be something faintly odd about his semi-cousin that he couldn’t put his finger on. The fact that he had become President of the Galaxy was frankly astonishing, as was the manner of his leaving the post. Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
Arthur slept: he was terribly tired.
There was a tap at Zaphod’s door. It slid open.
“Zaphod…?”
“Yeah?”
“I think we just found what you came to look for.”
“Hey, yeah?”
Ford gave up the attempt to sleep. In the corner of his cabin was a small computer screen and keyboard. He sat at it for a while and tried to compose a new entry for the Guide on the subject of Vogons but couldn’t think of anything vitriolic enough so he gave that up too, wrapped a robe round himself and went for a walk to the bridge.
As he entered he was surprised to see two figures hunched excitedly over the instruments.
“See? The ship’s about to move into orbit,” Trillian was saying. “There’s a planet out there. It’s at the exact coordinates you predicted.”
Zaphod heard a noise and looked up.
“Ford!” he hissed. “Hey, come and take a look at this.”
Ford went and had a look at it. It was a series of figures flashing over a screen.
