The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“What use is your life to anyone? When I think of what you’ve made of it the phrase ‘pig’s ear’ comes irresistibly to my mind.”

“But I was President of the Galaxy, man!”

“Huh,” muttered his ancestor, “And what kind of a job is that for a Beeblebrox?”

“Hey, what? Only President you know! Of the whole Galaxy!”

“Conceited little megapuppy.”

Zaphod blinked in bewilderment.

“Hey, er, what are you at, man? I mean Great Grandfather.”

The hunched up little figure stalked up to his great grandson and tapped him sternly on the knee. This had the effect of reminding Zaphod that he was talking to a ghost because he didn’t feel a thing.

“You know and I know what being President means, young Zaphod. You know because you’ve been it, and I know because I’m dead and it gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective. We have a saying up here. ‘Life is wasted on the living.’”

“Yeah,” said Zaphod bitterly, “very good. Very deep. Right now I need aphorisms like I need holes in my heads.”

“Fifty seconds,” grunted Ford Prefect.

“Where was I?” said Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth.

“Pontificating,” said Zaphod Beeblebrox.

“Oh yes.”

“Can this guy,” muttered Ford quietly to Zaphod, “actually in fact help us?”

“Nobody else can,” whispered Zaphod.

Ford nodded despondently.

“Zaphod!” the ghost was saying, “you became President of the Galaxy for a reason. Have you forgotten?”

“Could we go into this later?”

“Have you forgotten!” insisted the ghost.

“Yeah! Of course I forgot! I had to forget. They screen your brain when you get the job you know. If they’d found my head full of tricksy ideas I’d have been right out on the streets again with nothing but a fat pension, secretarial staff, a fleet of ships and a couple of slit throats.”

“Ah,” nodded the ghost in satisfaction, “then you do remember!”

He paused for a moment.

“Good,” he said and the noise stopped.

“Forty-eight seconds,” said Ford. He looked again at his watch and tapped it. He looked up.

“Hey, the noise has stopped,” he said.

A mischievous twinkle gleamed in the ghost’s hard little eyes.

“I’ve slowed down time for a moment,” he said, “just for a moment you understand. I would hate you to miss all I have to say.”

“No, you listen to me, you see-through old bat,” said Zaphod leaping out of his chair, “A—thanks for stopping time and all that, great, terrific, wonderful, but B—no thanks for the homily, right? I don’t know what this great thing I’m meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right?

“The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so hoopy. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain—my own brain—and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t be able to go and be President, and I wouldn’t be able to steal this ship, which must be the important thing.

“But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn’t he, by changing my brain? OK, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he got.

“Except this old self of mine tried to leave himself in control, leaving orders for me in the bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don’t want to know, and I don’t want to hear them. That’s my choice. I’m not going to be anybody’s puppet, particularly not my own.”

Zaphod banged the console in fury, oblivious to the dumbfolded looks he was attracting.

“The old me is dead!” he raved, “Killed himself! The dead shouldn’t hang about trying to interfere with the living!”

“And yet you summon me up to help you out of a scrape,” said the ghost.

“Ah,” said Zaphod, sitting down again, “well that’s different isn’t it?”

He grinned at Trillian, weakly.

“Zaphod,” rasped the apparition, “I think the only reason I waste my breath on you is that being dead I don’t have any other use for it.”

“OK,” said Zaphod, “why don’t you tell me what the big secret is. Try me.”

“Zaphod, you knew when you were President of the Galaxy, as did Yooden Vranx before you, that the President is nothing. A cipher. Somewhere in the shadows behind is another man, being, something, with ultimate power. That man, or being, or something, you must find—the man who controls this Galaxy, and—we suspect—others. Possibly the entire Universe.”

“Why?”

“Why?” exclaimed an astonished ghost, “Why? Look around you lad, does it look to you as if it’s in very good hands?”

“It’s alright.”

The old ghost glowered at him.

“I will not argue with you. You will simply take this ship, this Improbability Drive ship to where it is needed. You will do it. Don’t think you can escape your purpose. The Improbability Field controls you, you are in its grip. What’s this?”

He was standing tapping at one of the terminals of Eddie the Shipboard Computer. Zaphod told him.

“What’s it doing?”

“It is trying,” said Zaphod with wonderful restraint, “to make tea.”