36
"Good luck," he added, and walked out of the door, disappearing from
Zaphod's life as mysteriously as he had entered it.
Zaphod leapt up and tried the door, but Roosta had already looked it.
He shrugged and returned to the corner.
Two minutes later, the building crashlanded amongst the other wreck-
age. Its escort of Frogstar Fighters deactivated their force beams and
soared off into the air again, bound for Frogstar World A, an altogether
more congenial spot. They never landed on Frogstar World B. No one
did. No one ever walked on its surface other than the intended victims
of the Total Perspective Vortex.
Zaphod was badly shaken by the crash. He lay for a while in the silent
dusty rubble to which most of the room had been reduced. He felt that he
was at the lowest ebb he had ever reached in his life. He felt bewildered,
he felt lonely, he felt unloved. Eventually he felt he ought to get whatever
it was over with.
He looked around the cracked and broken room. The wall had split round
the door frame, and the door hung open. The window, by some miracle
was closed and unbroken. For a while he hesitated, then he thought
that if his strange and recent companion had been through all that he
had been through just to tell him what he had told him, then there
must be a good reason for it. With Marvin's help he got the window
open. Outside it, the cloud of dust aroused by the crash, and the hulks
of the other buildings with which this one was surrounded, effectively
prevented Zaphod from seeing anything of the world outside.
Not that this concerned him unduly. His main concern was what he saw
when he looked down. Zarniwoop's office was on the fifteenth floor. The
building had landed at a tilt of about forty-five degrees, but still the
descent looked heart-stopping.
Eventually, stung by the continuous series of contemptuous looks that
Marvin appeared to be giving him, he took a deep breath and clambered
out on to the steeply inclined side of the building. Marvin followed him,
and together they began to crawl slowly and painfully down the fifteen
floors that separated them from the ground.
As he crawled, the dank air and dust choked his lungs, his eyes smarted
and the terrifying distance down made his heads spin.
The occasional remark from Marvin of the order of "This is the sort of
thing you lifeforms enjoy is it? I ask merely for information," did little
to improve his state of mind.
About half-way down the side of the shattered building they stopped to
rest. It seemed to Zaphod as he lay there panting with fear and exhaus-
tion that Marvin seemed a mite more cheerful than usual. Eventually
he realized this wasn't so. The robot just seemed cheerful in comparison
with his own mood.
A large, scraggy black bird came flapping through the slowly settling
clouds of dust and, stretching down its scrawny legs, landed on an in-
37
clined window ledge a couple of yards from Zaphod. It folded its ungainly
wings and teetered awkwardly on its perch.
Its wingspan must have been something like six feet, and its head and
neck seemed curiously large for a bird. Its face was flat, the beak under-
developed, and half-way along the underside of its wings the vestiges of
something handlike could be clearly seen.
In fact, it looked almost human.
It turned its heavy eyes on Zaphod and clicked its beak in a desultory
fashion.
"Go away," said Zaphod.
"OK," muttered the bird morosely and flapped off into the dust again.
Zaphod watched its departure in bewilderment.
"Did that bird just talk to me?" he asked Marvin nervously. He was
quite prepared to believe the alternative explanation, that he was in
fact hallucinating.
"Yes," confirmed Marvin.
"Poor souls," said a deep, ethereal voice in Zaphod's ear.
Twisting round violently to find the source of the voice nearly caused
Zaphod to fall off the building. He grabbed savagely at a protruding
window fitting and cut his hand on it. He hung on, breathing heavily.
The voice had no visible source whatever - there was no one there.
Nevertheless, it spoke again.
"A tragic history behind them, you know. A terrible blight."
Zaphod looked wildly about. The voice was deep and quiet. In other
circumstances it would even be described as soothing. There is, however,
nothing soothing about being addressed by a disembodied voice out of
nowhere, particularly if you are, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, not at your
best and hanging from a ledge eight storeys up a crashed building.
"Hey, er ..." he stammered.
"Shall I tell you their story?" inquired the voice quietly.
"Hey, who are you?" panted Zaphod. "Where are you?"
"Later then, perhaps," murmured the voice. "I am Gargravarr. I am the
Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex."
"Why can't I see ..."
"You will find your progress down the building greatly facilitated," the
voice lifted, "if you move about two yards to your left. Why don't you
try it?"
Zaphod looked and saw a series of short horizontal grooves leading all
the way down the side of the building. Gratefully he shifted himself
across to them.
