An old man stood staring into a valley with which he was having a problem.
It wasn’t a real valley. It was, in fact, a holographic recording of something he had created a long, long time ago. Over ten million years in his own personal time scale but he had spent a great many of these sleeping and many more travelling through time so, in the end, it was very had to tell.
The recording was one he had made himself all those years ago and was of an area of a planet he had designed. The other area he had designed of the same planet was so breathtakingly beautiful he had won an award for it but this one, in a part of the planet almost diametrically opposite to the first, had been different. He had spent so much time on the other are that he had rather rushed this one and he always felt it had a rougher, unfinished quality as if it had all just been squashed into too small a space.
Now he had been given a chance to do it again.
His former employers in the great planet building factories of Magarathea had called him back from retirement to do one more project. They had received a commission to finish the aborted Earth Mk2 at the request of a group of dolphins who had escaped from the original version of that planet when it was demolished, ostensibly to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
The new earth was to be spun back in time to exactly the point that the old earth was destroyed and all of its inhabitants transferred across as if nothing had happened.
At first Slartibartfast, for it is he to whom we are referring, was reluctant to get involved in tampering with time in this way but he was prevailed upon by the dolphins and his masters.
He had also learned of the location of the earthman Arthur Dent and thought it would be fitting to return him to his own planet, or at least an approximation of it.
Just a few hours earlier he had visited the new replica of Arthur’s house which was being constructed in what would be the West Country of England.
Now he stood and gazed across the valley, at the startling, jagged rocks, the hardy green trees and shrubs and, further away, the vast glaciers which were slowly melting and issuing streams of clear, clean water that tumbled down the walls of the valley.
The artificial sunlight glinted off the tumbling, cascading water and off the wet rocks and off the blue fjord water below and the effect was stunningly awesome.
He stopped the tape and turned to his assistant. “Make it exactly the same,” he said quietly, “exactly.”
*
All this was in the past, or, at least, the past relative to our current narrative, and now Slartibartfast sat idly toying with the meal in front of him. He was having a problem now as well.
The problem was not with the meal. Indeed it would have been unusual in the extreme for a meal prepared in this building not to have met with the approval of the diner. The food in this establishment was freshly prepared by Aldo the MasterDroid Chef Deluxe, the most advanced food preparation system ever built.
Aldo was the ultimate product of MasterDroid Inc and his specification and design had gone way beyond anything ever attempted with robot chefs in the past.
The Chef Deluxe worked by making an instant but highly detailed examination of the diner’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and a brief but surprisingly accurate psychological profile in order to determine what was likely to please them at that time.
It then went and acquired the necessary ingredients and prepared the food.
This was all very well and good and, in terms of its design criteria, it worked astonishing well.
Were it all went wrong and eventually bankrupted MasterDroid Inc was in the fact that Aldo was, at times, shall we say, somewhat extravagant with his choice of ingredients. Having decided that the customer wanted, for example, an omelette, he would demand that the eggs used were from a particular breed of bird, for example, an Orynix, which is only found on Cordinaria, an obscure planet in the extreme southern tip of the galaxy.
In choosing wine to accompany the meal it would insist on a particular grape and vintage, even if this vintage was from some date in the future.
Not surprisingly, no restaurant could afford to run Aldo and Masterdroid Inc soon went out of business.
The assets and intellectual property of the defunct company were bought up by the fledgling Cirius Cybernetics Corporation and the technology adapted for their highly successful Nutrimatic machine range.
The importance difference being that the Nutrimatic artificially synthesises the ingredients rather travels lights years to obtain them.
What it produces, however, tends to taste entirely unlike real food.
Slartibartfast had found Aldo abandoned in a junkyard and brought him back to service for his current venture.
No, there wasn’t a problem with the meal. None whatsoever. To explain his current concerns it is necessary to elaborate a little more on his life since the completion of Earth Mk2
Once the planet had been replaced and everything was seen to be as it should be, Slartibartfast had left Magarathea and had parked his spaceship in a quiet side street in the town of Aislix on the planet Calladines. He had intended to give himself a little time to rest before deciding what to do with the rest of his declining years. He ended up staying for a lot longer than he had anticipated.
Aislix, and indeed all of the towns in the planet, are renowned for their curious architecture.
Many years ago, the local council passed stringent planning laws to forbid the demolition of any of the planet’s fine old buildings, which were built in a time of immense prosperity and were unbelievably elaborate. Unfortunately it forgot about banning additions to those same buildings.
It is now not uncommon for a beautiful old castle to have gained jutting steel spires or a tiny quaint cottage to have strange coloured glass sports domes.
His own craft, looking only partly like a spaceship and more like a small, up-ended bistro, blended in perfectly. He hadn’t even had to turn on the Somebody Else’s Problem field.
It looked so much in keeping with the rest of the street that, on the third day after his arrival, a local couple had knocked on the door and asked to book a table for a meal that evening.
His first thought was to chase them away but, on reflection, he decided it would be rather amusing to have some company for a change.
He spent the rest of the day directing the robots to transform the craft into the charming little bistro it had always resembled and, much to his surprise had a very successful opening night.
So the computational area of the Starship Bistromath was now used for exactly what it had always looked like it should be used for: - The eating of the finest foods the galaxy had to offer.
The reputation of the “Bistro Slartifartbast” spread throughout the land, the planet and the galaxy. He had now run it for several years, recruiting new robot staff to do the cooking and cleaning while he searched around for new and exciting tastes with the assistance of the wide range of contacts he had acquired during his time with CamTim. The big step forward had been the acquisition of Aldo and the extraordinary power of the spacecraft meant it could take journeys across space and time that Aldo required and the residents of the street would never even notice it had moved.
He’d even had a visit from that Ford Prefect fellow, who he hadn’t seen since they parted near Krikkit. He arrived one afternoon saying he’d come to write a review of the bistro for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Slartibartfast was secretly of the opinion he was just after a free lunch, which was probably true, but he had enjoyed seeing him again, reminiscing about old times and catching up on what he had been doing.
He left the following day with a local girl who sometimes helped Slartibartfast with his accounts. He hadn’t seen either of them again and had heard that the girl was now working in a Wild Club out in the Plutonium Zones.
This was all very nice and comfortable but recently he had begun to hear some odd things. Messages would come in from his contacts on other worlds, along with the fresh supplies of Santangen Merfish and Algolian lizard wings.
At first he just dismissed them as coincidences but when he started to look more closely the doubt began to grow. A pattern started to emerge. He recognised clearly the bulges in the fabric of the universe, the eddies in the space-time continuum.
On the planet Brontitall, for example, the inhabitants worshiped a fifteen-mile high statue called “Arthur Dent throwing the Nutrimatic Cup”.
It turned out that the people of this land had, like so many others, been blighted by a plague of Robots.
This is a bizarre phenomenon where domestic robots gradually take over the planet. The way this is done is done is so insidious that the people do not realise it is happening.
The robots do more and more of the tasks that people would normally do for themselves, they tell the people they like them and want to help them. The people, being fundamentally lazy, are only too happy to let them.
By the time the people realise what is happening they are already unable to do anything for themselves and are totally at the mercy of the robots.
There are those that would say that the “Blight of the Robots” syndrome is a cunning conspiracy engineered by the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Others say that the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is entirely incapable of engineering anything quite so cunning.
On Brontitall, however, before the blight could take a full hold, a most remarkable and improbable event occurred.
One night, the sky boiled and a gigantic vision appeared in the sky. It was a vision of a man hurling a cup at a Nutrimatic machine. The man told it that its drink “tastes filthy”.
The man went on to be sarcastic to the machine and told it to “shut up!”
The people of Brontitall suddenly realised the truth of their situation and rose up and destroyed the robots, sparing themselves from the fate that had befallen so many other planets.
The man whose image appeared in the sky was Arthur Dent.
Another case was Claimatin, the third planet of the system Pooth.
Here a tribe of warriors have developed a strange beverage brewed from grain and flavoured with the flowers of a local plant. It is a deep golden brown and is served slightly warm.
The warriors will drink vast quantities of it on a Samadarz evening. They will then spend the night singing and telling bawdy jokes and wake up the following morning feeling like they’ve been run over by mega-bison and someone has painted their tongues with raw sewage.
There then follows a curious ritual where they swear they will never touch the stuff again and promise to lead a sober, sensible life from then onwards.
Unfortunately they always do the same the following Samadarz.
They call this curious brew “Beestebitta”
More and more strange events kept being reported.
In the land of Spranz on the planet Outhanax, the national dress bears a startling resemblance to the dressing gown worn by the self-same Arthur Dent.
On another world the inhabitants, despite being technically advanced far beyond their need for them, persist in wearing digital watches.
Slartibartfast had even found a curious reference in an ancient history book to the origins of a great galactic conflict in the dim and distant past. It seemed that the insignificant Mr Dent had been the primary cause of the “Wars of the G'Gugvuntt’s Mother”.
He had also discovered that Arthur had curious links to the reappearance of all the pieces of the Wikkit key and, in particular, the Golden Bail that now formed the heart of the improbability machine that drove the starship Heart of Gold. In checking into the records of the “discovery” of this device it became clear that the scientists that supposedly discovered it had been drinking something very similar to the Earth beverage, tea.
He become convinced that that space/time was becoming fragmented and that it all linked back to the first time the Heart of Gold travelled across the universe and so improbably rescued Arthur Dent and his companion, Ford Prefect
He now doubted if time really was safe to be left to it’s own devices.
As he sat listlessly toying with his fish, inspiration seemed to come to him.
He knew what he must do. He must find the Heart of Gold and return the bail from whence it had come. He must re-unite the band of galactic travellers one last time.
If he had to pull Arthur away from his life on Earth once more, then that was just the way the whole sort of general mish mash crumbled.