Дуглас Адамс – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Руководство для путешествующих автостопом по Галактике (страница 5)

Only one man stood and watched the sky, with terrible sadness in his eyes and rubber plugs in his ears[50]. He knew exactly what was happening and had known since his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic had started blinking in the night and woken him up. It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had got the signal, sitting alone in his small dark room, coldness had gripped his heart. Of all the races in the Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, it just didn’t have to be the Vogons.

Still he knew what he had to do. As the Vogon craft moved through the air high above him, he opened his bag. He threw away a couple of things. He wouldn’t need them where he was going. Everything was ready, everything was prepared.

He knew where his towel was.

A sudden silence hit the Earth. It was worse than the noise. For a while nothing happened.

The great ships hung in the air, over every nation on Earth. They hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, against the law of nature. Many people went into shock as their minds tried to understand what they were looking at. The ships just hung in the sky.

And still nothing happened.

Then there was a whisper, a sudden whisper of sound. Every hi-fi system in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every piece of rusty metal became activated.

Before the Earth was gone, it turned into the greatest public address system[51] ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no siren, just a simple message.

“People of Earth, your attention please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful, perfect sound.

“This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you know, the plans for development of the regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route[52] through your star system, and your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”

The public address ended.

Terror moved slowly through the crowds of the people of Earth. They started to panic, but there was nowhere to run to.

Seeing all this, the Vogons turned on their public address again. It said: “There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the plans and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri[53] for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to complain, and it’s too late to start making a fuss[54] about it now.”

The public address was silent again and its echo drifted across the land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky. On the underside of each ship a hatchway[55] opened, an empty black space.

By this time somebody somewhere had used a radio transmitter and sent a message back to the Vogon ships, on behalf of[56] the planet. Nobody ever heard what it said, they only heard the answer.

The public address was turned on again. The voice was annoyed. It said:

“What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven’s sake[57], mankind, it’s only four light years away! I’m sorry, but if you don’t take any interest in the local affairs, that’s your own problem. Energize the demolition beams.”

Light poured out of the hatchways.

“I don’t know,” said the voice on the PA again, “bloody apathetic planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.” It cut off.[58]

There was a terrible silence.

There was a terrible noise.

There was a terrible silence.

The Vogon Constructor fleet moved away into the black starry void.

Chapter 4

Far away, at the other end of the Galaxy, five hundred thousand light years from the star Sol, Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, sped across the seas of Damogran in his ion-drive[59] delta-boat. Damogran the hot; Damogran the remote; Damogran the almost totally unknown.

Damogran – the secret home of the Heart of Gold.

The boat sped on across the water. Damogran is such an inconveniently arranged planet. It consists only of large desert islands separated by very pretty but annoyingly wide oceans.

The boat sped on and on.

Because of this inconvenient arrangement Damogran has always been a deserted planet. This is why the Imperial Galactic Government chose Damogran for the Heart of Gold project, because it was so deserted and the Heart of Gold was so secret.

The boat sped across the sea, the sea that lay between the main islands of the only archipelago on the whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (by coincidence, in Galacticspeke[60], easter means “small, flat and light brown”) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another coincidence was called France.

But it was not a coincidence that today, the day of culmination of the project, the great day when the Heart of Gold would finally be introduced to the Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the President[61], a decision which had shocked everyone in the Imperial Galaxy – Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the [62] Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President?

Many had decided that the whole Creation had finally gone crazy. Zaphod Beeblebrox – adventurer, ex-hippy, good-timer, manic self-publicist[63], terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out of his mind[64] – President?

Yes, President.

Full title: President of the Imperial Galactic Government. The term Imperial is kept though the real Emperor is almost dead and has been so for many centuries. In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a stasis field[65] which simply keeps him in this state. All his heirs are now long dead, and this means that power has simply and effectively moved to the Governmental Assembly and a President elected by that Assembly.

The President is actually a figurehead – he has no real power whatsoever. He is chosen by the government, but the President is always a strange choice, always a fascinating character. His job is to draw attention away from the power. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had – he has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud.

Very, very few people realize that the President and the Government have no power at all, and of these very few people only six know whom the political power belongs to. Most of the others secretly believe that the decision-making is done by a computer. They can’t be more wrong.[66]

So only six people in the Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his plan to run for President it was more or less done: he was the ideal candidate.

What they failed to understand was why Zaphod was doing it.

Zaphod grinned and sped up the boat. Today was the day. Today was the day when they would realize what Zaphod had been planning. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox’s Presidency was all about. Today was also his two-hundredth birthday, but that was just another coincidence.

As he steered his boat across the seas of Damogran he smiled quietly to himself about what a wonderful exciting day it was going to be. He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily along the back of his seat, steering with an extra arm he’d recently fitted just below his right one.

“Hey,” he said to himself, “you’re a real cool boy, you know.”

But he was still nervous.

The island of France was about twenty miles long, five miles wide, sandy and crescent shaped, forming a huge bay. Its coastline was mostly cliffs. On top of the cliffs stood the reception committee. It consisted of the engineers and researchers who had built the Heart of Gold – mostly humanoid, but here and there were a few reptiloids, two or three green maximegalacticans, an octopoid or two, and a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue). All except the Hooloovoo were wearing their multicolored lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been shaped into a prism for the occasion.

All of them were excited and thrilled.

Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.

The crowd gasped[67] as the shiny Presidential speedboat entered the bay, splashing water in every direction. In fact, it didn’t need to touch the water at all because it was running on a cushion of ionized atoms – but just for effect it had thin blades which could be lowered into the water.

Zaphod loved effect: it was what he was best at.

He turned the wheel sharply, the boat spun around wildly and stopped on the rocking waves.

Zaphod ran out onto the deck and waved and grinned at over three billion people. The three billion people weren’t actually there, but they watched his every move through the eyes of a small robot tri-D camera which hovered in the air nearby. The antics of the President always made amazingly popular tri-D; that’s what they were for.

Zaphod grinned again.

Three billion and six people didn’t know it, but today they would see the biggest antic ever.