It was only when it was realised that the present really was being impoverished, and that the reason for it was that those selfish plundering wastrel bastards up in the future were doing exactly the same thing, that everyone realised that every single aorist rod, and the terrible secret of how they were made, would have to be utterly and forever destroyed. They claimed it was for the sake of their grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their grandparents’ grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandparents.
The official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration gave a dismissive shrug. “They’re perfectly safe,” he said. He glanced up at Zaphod and suddenly said with uncharacteristic frankness, “There’s worse than that on board. At least,” he added, tapping at one of the computer screens, “I hope it’s on board.”
The other official rounded on him sharply.
“What the hell do you think you’re saying?” he snapped.
The first shrugged again. He said, “It doesn’t matter. He can say what he likes. No one would believe him. It’s why we chose to use him rather than do anything official, isn’t it? The more wild the story he tells, the more it’ll sound like he’s some hippy adventurer making it up. He can even say that we said this and it’ll make him sound like a paranoid.” He smiled pleasantly at Zaphod, who was seething in a suit full of sick. “You may accompany us,” he told him, “if you wish.”
* * *
“You see?” said the official, examining the ultra-titanium outer seals of the aorist rod hold. “Perfectly secure, perfectly safe.”
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical weapons so powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire planet.
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could blow up a whole planet.
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could irradiate a whole planet.
“I’m glad I’m not a planet,” muttered Zaphod.
“You’d have nothing to fear,” assured the official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration. “Planets are very safe. Provided,” he added – and paused. They were approaching the hold nearest to the point where the back of the starship Billion Year Bunker was broken. The corridor here was twisted and deformed, and the floor was damp and sticky in patches.
“Ho-hum,” he said, “ho very much hum.”
“What’s in this hold?” demanded Zaphod.
“By-products,” said the official, clamming up again.
“By-products…” insisted Zaphod, quietly, “of what?”
Neither official answered. Instead they examined the hold door very carefully and saw that its seals were twisted apart by the forces that had deformed the whole corridor. One of them touched the door lightly. It swung open to his touch. There was darkness inside, with just a couple of dim yellow lights deep within it.
“Of what?” hissed Zaphod.
The leading official turned to the other.
“There’s an escape capsule,” he said, “that the crew were to use to abandon ship before jettisoning it into the black hole,” he said. “I think it would be good to know that it’s still there.” The other official nodded and left without a word.
The first official quietly beckoned Zaphod in. The large dim yellow lights glowed about twenty feet from them.
“The reason,” he said quietly, “why everything else in this ship is, I maintain, safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No one. At least no one that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that mad or dangerous rings very deep alarm bells. People may be stupid, but they’re not that stupid.”
“By-products,” hissed Zaphod again – he had to hiss in order that his voice shouldn’t be heard to tremble – “of what?”
“Er, Designer People.”
“What?”
“The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the ‘people’ and ‘personalities’ turned out to be amalgams of characteristics which simply could not coexist in naturally occurring life-forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn’t ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger.
“The most dangerous of all were three identical ones – they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be allowed to do…”
Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw that the two lights framed a third space where something was broken. Wet, sticky patches gleamed dully on the floor.
Zaphod and the official walked cautiously toward the lights. At that moment, four words came crashing into the helmet headsets from the other official.
“The capsule has gone,” he said tersely.
“Trace it,” snapped Zaphod’s companion. “Find exactly where it has gone. We must know where it has gone!”
Zaphod approached the two remaining tanks. A quick glance showed him that each contained an identical floating body. He examined one more carefully. The body, that of an elderly man, was floating in a thick yellow liquid. The man was kindly looking, with lots of pleasant laugh lines round his face. His hair seemed unnaturally thick and dark for someone of his age, and his right hand seemed continually to be weaving forward and back, up and down, as if shaking hands with an endless succession of unseen ghosts. He smiled genially, babbled and burbled like a half-sleeping baby, and occasionally seemed to rock very slightly with little tremors of laughter, as if he had just told himself a joke he hadn’t heard before, or didn’t remember properly. Waving, smiling, chortling, with little yellow bubbles beading on his lips, he seemed to inhabit a distant world of simple dreams.
Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The planet toward which the escape capsule had headed had already been identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
Zaphod found a small speaker by the tank, and turned it on. The man in the yellow liquid was babbling gently about a shining city on a hill.
He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration issue instructions to the effect that the missing escape capsule contained a “Reagan” and that the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha must be made “Perfectly safe.”
TIME TRAVEL IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Stan Love
We are all time travelers.
But time travel as it’s commonly practiced is not as much fun as it ought to be. We’re doing it all the time, so it gets monotonous. We can’t control our routing very well, so there are surprises and disappointments. We can’t change our speed, a stately 3600 seconds per hour, except at the infinitesimal end of a long string of decimal places. Not exactly adventure travel. We are all stuck on the same train, and for practical purposes it never speeds up, slows down, or goes backward.