Trillian stopped and studied one of them but could not interpret any sense in them. She called to Zaphod.
'Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?'
'I think they're just strange symbols of some kind,' said Zaphod, hardly glancing back.
Trillian shrugged and hurried after him.
From time to time a doorway led either to the left or right into smallish chambers which Ford discovered to be full of derelict computer equipment. He dragged Zaphod into one to have a look. Trillian followed.
'Look,' said Ford, 'you reckon this is Magrathea…'
'Yeah,' said Zaphod, 'and we heard the voice, right?'
'OK, so I've bought the fact that it's Magrathea—for the moment. What you have so far said nothing about is how in the Galaxy you found it. You didn't just look it up in a star atlas, that's for sure.'
'Research. Government archives. Detective work. Few lucky guesses. Easy.'
'And then you stole the Heart of Gold to come and look for it with?'
'I stole it to look for a lot of things.'
'A lot of things?' said Ford in surprise. 'Like what?'
'I don't know.'
'What?'
'I don't know what I'm looking for.'
'Why not?'
'Because… because… I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn't be able to look for them.'
'What, are you crazy?'
'It's a possibility I haven't ruled out yet,' said Zaphod quietly. 'I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.'
For a long time nobody said anything as Ford gazed at Zaphod with a mind suddenly full of worry.
'Listen old friend, if you want to…' started Ford eventually.
'No, wait… I'll tell you something,' said Zaphod. 'I freewheel a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I'll become President of the Galaxy, and it just happens, it's easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right, but it always works out. It's like having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you never send off the cheques. And then whenever I stop and think—why did I want to do something?—how did I work out how to do it?—I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it. Like I have now. It's a big effort to talk about it.'
Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he frowned and said, 'Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn't seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn't use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check.
'I went to the ship's medical bay and plugged myself into the encephelographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads—all the tests I had to go through under government medical officers before my nomination for Presidency could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn't have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I tried superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I'd given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?'
Ford nodded.
'And there it was,' said Zaphod, 'clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatised those two lumps of cerebellum.'
Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white.
'Somebody did that to you?' whispered Ford.
'Yeah.'
'But have you any idea who? Or why?'
'Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was.'
'You know? How do you know?'
'Because they left their initials burnt into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see.'
Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl.
'Initials? Burnt into your brain?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, what were they, for God's sake?'
Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he looked away.
'Z.B.,' he said.
At that moment a steel shutter slammed down behind them and gas started to pour into the chamber.
'I'll tell you about it later,' choked Zaphod as all three passed out.
Chapter 21
On the surface of Magrathea Arthur wandered about moodily.
Ford had thoughtfully left him his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to while away the time with. He pushed a few buttons at random.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.
One of these (the one Arthur now came across) supposedly relates the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the biros he'd bought over the past few years.
There followed a long period of painstaking research during which he visited all the major centres of biro loss throughout the galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory which quite caught the public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended biros would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely biroid lifestyle, responding to highly biro-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the biro equivalent of the good life.
And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.
There did, however, remain the question of both the mysterious 60,000 Altairan dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank account, and of course Zaphod Beeblebrox's highly profitable second-hand biro business.
