Arthur Dent sat motionless on the stairs of Stavro Mueller’s Beta Night Club. All around him people were rushing. Ford Prefect was sitting on the step below him laughing insanely. He was vaguely aware of Trillain and the other woman who looked just like her comforting his daughter Random at the bottom of the stairs.
He felt numb.
There was a sudden realisation that, from this point on, the apparent immortality he had gained as a result of the conversation with Agrajag all those years ago had now deserted him and he was as vulnerable as any other human now.
This was not what numbed him, however, the numbness came from the surprising fact that he really didn’t care. He was ready to die.
There was a blinding crash and a screaming light. The earth beneath his feet seemed to fly away from him.
He had no weight, he had no body, he drifted in a sea of light.
The light became a swirl of colours, he span through the swirl down a seemingly never-ending tunnel towards an infinitely distant dark point.
As he span his thoughts span with the light.
“If this is dying, at least a get a good show on the way. I wonder what happens when I get to heaven… or hell… or whatever.”
He turned to see the way he had come and was surprised to see a sofa drifting along behind him. In a moment it caught up with him and cradled him gently.
Yet again he was stunned to find it was the same velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa Ford and he had chased across prehistoric earth only to be dumped unceremoniously in the middle of a cricket match. The same sofa whose illusion had been created for Trillian and himself to rest on in the huge dust cloud around the planet Krikkit.
This thought brought wild images to him but he couldn’t tell if they were real or in his imagination.
Images of the Krikkit robots batting fire and destruction, Zaphod, Slartibartfast, Marvin the pathetic robot.
Far off he thought he could see Trillian, Random, also spinning in the wild maelstrom.
Then, right in front of him, the face of the woman he loved, the beautiful face of Fenchurch. He reached for her but she dissolved into still more streams of blinding light.
The, flying near to him in the swirling colour he could see something, someone. Ford Prefect!
“Oh, dear God, don’t tell me I have to have him in Heaven as well!”
Ford drifted across and landed beside him on the sofa. He was still laughing and grinning inanely. They sped on through the swirling storms, spinning and turning, dancing and diving. Then suddenly a vicious unreasonable storm spewed them up on a pavement.
On the pavement they lay gulping like half-spent fish.
“Wah… Wuh… Huh…” said Arthur, feeling like he’d left his vocal cords in some other suit.
“Buh… Duh… Waahhhh…” replied Ford.
He knew he had his but they didn’t seem to connect to his brain in any way and his tongue appeared to be somewhere near his left eyebrow.
All around them the sickening arrays of hideous colours and lights span on. A screaming, whirling noise seemed to be cleaning out the wax in their ears and take their brains with it.
Strange smells assaulted them… frying chips… Chanel No 5… Candyfloss... Donkey dung…
Far off in the distance a row of insane white houses lapped up and down to the rhythm of some unknown beat.
“Wait a minute…” said Ford when his tongue had freed itself and his brain had started to connect, “I’ve been here before.”
The screaming had turned to a wail, then to a whoosh, then to a waltz.
The wild colours had resolved into a Merry-go-round. Crazy horses span in the air around them.
“This is Southend.”
Just for a microsecond it appeared to Arthur Dent that everything stopped.
His eyes opened wider than seemed humanly possible. He slowly took in the scene around him. He closed them.
He opened them once more.
“Oh, no, not again!” he cried and buried his head in his hands. “Please not again.”
The curious waltz began again, faster and faster, curiouser and curiouser.
A loud, booming voice rang out above the music “Yo, guys!”
“Relax and take it easy, you’re gonna feel like a whole load of Arcturan mega-bison poo for a while as you’ve just been plucked from the jaws of death at an improbability level of…”
“Two to the power of infinity to the seven over ten!” chimed in a metallic voice.
“What?” came back the first voice, “what the hell sort of number is that?”
“It’s the improbablity factor we were running at,” replied the second.
“Joojooflop! Your circuits must be fried, computer.”
The two voices then became lost in an argument over the meaning of unreal numbers, their relationships to improbability physics and the parentage of the designers from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
“Zaphod? Is that you” called out Ford
“Yeah,” came back the voice, “just stay cool and we’ll come get you once everything’s settled down. We seem to be having a bit of a problem with the infinite improbability drive.”
“Well, well,” said Ford as he collapsed into a convenient deck chair, which promptly turned into a toadstool, “he’s done it again.”
Arthur just lay on the ground and gibbered. “No, no, I can’t go through this again, I can’t…”
“I’ve had enough of this improbability nonsense, please just let me find a quiet corner where I can curl up and die”
“Oh, come on, Arthur, it’s time for excitement and really wild things again.” Ford waved to a giant child on a prancing candy steed.
The Merry-go-round began to falter and the waltz became slower and slower like an old gramophone gradually winding down.
Then, abruptly, it stopped.
Ford and Arthur fell to the hard metal floor with a crash.
A door opened with a “whoosh” and a “Glad to be of service!” and they heard footsteps approaching.
Arthur slowly raised his head and tried to focus. A woman was standing near him; she stooped over him. There was something very familiar about her. She was older but still as beautiful as ever. To his utter astonishment he found himself looking into the eyes of the woman he had loved and lost all those years ago.
“Thank you, God,” he gasped, “now I know I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“No you haven’t!” she cried. “It’s me, it really me!”
Arthur stood slowly. He reached his arms out and wrapped them around her. He hugged and squeezed and held her like he was never going to let go. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
“I feared that too, but I never gave up hope, and here you are.” Fenchurch’s face was streaming with tears of joy.
Alongside this another reunion was taking place.
Zaphod and Roosta had entered just behind Fenchurch and were now engaging with Ford in a wild shaking of hands, patting of packs and general celebration.
Even Slartibartfast, who had held back but now joined the throng, could not hold back his emotion.
With all the happy sounds and crying for joy going on it was hardly surprising that no one had noticed that there was another sort of crying in the room.
When there was a short break in the actual shrieking, Arthur noticed it and turned. He motioned the others to be quiet.
From over in a far corner of the entry bay could be heard a whimpering sobbing.
Arthur moved across too see and was shocked to see the figure of a teenage girl hunched over something lying on the floor.
“Random!”
He ran to her. As he ran she turned and he could clearly see that the object she was hunched over was another person. Another female, dressed in a Rymplontm travel suit.
He crouched down, wrapping an arm round Random as he did.
With his other arm he reached to roll the still figure over towards him. As he did, Trillian’s head lolled over, eyes wide open but blank. Arthur jerked backwards, startled.
The shock of this, however, was nothing to what followed.
Underneath Trillian’s head was a second, seemingly identical, head, sleeping peacefully.