Darrent Staroval skilfully guided his little blue star buggy in to land on the outskirts of Aislix.
“I’ll leave her here and we can walk the rest of the way,” he said to his wife Valerin, “I don’t want to have to take her out of a busy town once I’ve had a few Jinnan Tawnicks, do I?”
“Whatever you say, dear” she replied. She said it a little tightly. She was beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea after all.
Darrent had said that it would be the meal of a lifetime, well worth the many days of travel once they got there and tasted the food.
She wasn’t so sure. The last time he had a bright idea like this they had gone to Milliways, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. She had got very timesick and had hardly eaten a thing. She had found that ghastly Quordlepleen person very tiresome and the whole thing had been such an anticlimax.
Still, you only reached your 500th birthday once and, even it these days of life extending drugs, it was quite a landmark.
This place had had a glowing write-up in that Guide thing that Darrent was always playing about with so she had let him persuade her.
They had put on their best finery and were immaculately dressed as befitted a man in his position and his consort.
For Darrent Staroval regarded himself as the Galaxy’s foremost restaurant critic and Gastronomic expert.
Unfortunately the rest of the galaxy, in general, and the galactic press, in particular, no longer agreed and he now did this more as a hobby than a genuine way of living.
They walked into town and found the quiet side street.
The Bistro had no signs, no advertising. People knew where it was by word of mouth. “Always a good sign” thought Darrent.
He was salivating at the thought of the meal he was about to have. He could almost taste the succulent meats, the crisp vegetables, the breathtaking deserts and the heady liqueurs.
Suddenly the building gave a little shimmer and when they looked again, it was gone. Darrent could not believe it, he ran across to where it had been but there was nothing but a vacant plot of land.
“What… How… Where…” his mouth had gone from dripping to an astonishing dryness in a matter of seconds and he could not form a sentence.
“Guess it’s takeaway for dinner again tonight then?” his wife muttered, turning sharply on her immaculate heel and walking back the way they had just come.
A short time later but a very many light years away from these events, a spacecraft materialised in the middle of a field near a small West Country village.
Slartibartfast walked out of the door, flicking a button on a small hand control as he did. The ship had lifted off from Aislix and hurtled across the Galaxy at a mind-buggering speed that still amazed him, even after all these years, and all he’d had to do was stir his coffee.
He strolled along to where he knew he would find Arthur Dent’s house. He knew because that’s where he had put it or rather, he had instructed his apprentice to put it. He had been too busy creating the majestic fjords of Norway to be bothered by the plain countryside of England but he wanted to be sure that this particular house was just right.
He was surprised to find Arthur not at home but managed to open a window and climb inside to wait.
When he first saw the state of the living room, he thought the house must have been burgled.
Two smashed and bound dining chairs lay in a corner.
There were numerous empty gin bottles, beer cans and pizza boxes lying about the place.
Closer inspection, however, gave him some clues as to what had happened to the house’s inhabitants.
Several neat lists of items to be packed in rucksacks were pinned on a noticeboard.
Old newspapers told of the arrival of a strange spaceship, its occupant’s bizarre visit to a place called Bournemouth and its subsequent departure.
Little telltale signs around the place indicated feminine occupation. He thought this odd, as he knew Arthur lived alone.
It all pointed to the fact that Ford Prefect and, he thought, wrongly, the earth woman Trillian had returned and that Arthur Dent had gone with them.
But why and where had they gone to?
He had hoped to tackle Arthur first, before tracking down the others and the Heart of Gold. The Earthman would, he felt, be much easier to convince about the urgency of his mission than would the freewheeling Prefect and his anarchic semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox.
When he had last seen them, near Krikkit, he had reluctantly let Beeblebrox take the gold bail and re-activate the ship. Reluctantly, he now realised, because he most have known, deep inside, that the defeat of Hactar was not the end, merely a waypoint on the path of saving the universe from doom.
He left the living room and wandered up the stairs. In one of the bedrooms he found the grey glass bowl his apprentice had also put there. The Magaratheans had left these in the houses of many Earth people who the Dolphins had said had helped them.
Finding no further clues he walked to the front door, pausing to pick up a pile of paper packets lying just inside it. He opened a few and was surprised to find most of them came from just two sources. One lot offered, it seemed, vast amounts of money through the use of a small green card, the others threatened dire consequences for the unauthorised use of a similar card.
“Strange creatures, these humans” he muttered as he walked out the door and back to his ship.
He sat for a while contemplating his next course of action
He knew they had not come to Earth aboard the Heart of Gold, as his newly installed Improbometer registered no recent improbability field.
This meant that if he found the Heart of Gold, it would most likely be in the hands of Beeblebrox.
They had left this planet on what he recognised in the newspapers as a Xaxisian starcruiser. Something that size shouldn’t be that difficult to trace so that was the best bet.
The Bistromath blurred the sky and vanished from the Solar System. The cows in the field wondered what had happened to the odd cowshed that had appeared earlier in the day but then, after ruminating for a while, thought that was probably somebody else’s problem.