Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

Author:Douglas Adams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Science-Fiction
ISBN: 9780307496508
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-07-14T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

rthur materialized, and did so with all the customary staggering about and clasping at his throat, heart and various limbs that he still indulged himself in whenever he made any of these hateful and painful materializations that he was determined not to let himself get used to. He looked around for the others.

They weren’t there.

He looked around for the others again.

They still weren’t there.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them.

He looked around for the others.

They obstinately persisted in their absence.

He closed his eyes again, preparatory to making this completely futile exercise once more, and because it was only then, while his eyes were closed, that his brain began to register what his eyes had been looking at while they were open, a puzzled frown crept across his face.

So he opened his eyes again to check his facts and the frown stayed put.

If anything, it intensified, and got a good firm grip. If this was a party, it was a very bad one, so bad, in fact, that everyone else had left. He abandoned this line of thought as futile. Obviously this wasn’t a party. It was a cave, or a labyrinth or a tunnel or something—there was insufficient light to tell, certainly insufficient light to hold a party in. All was darkness, a damp, shiny darkness.

And there was no sound, no noise at all, except for the echoes of his own breathing, which sounded worried. And the more he listened to them, the more worried they began to sound.

He coughed very slightly, in an introductory sort of way. He then had to listen to the thin ghostly echo of his cough trailing off among winding corridors and sightless chambers, as of some great labyrinth, and eventually returning to him via further unseen corridors, as if to say … “Yes?”

This happened to every noise he made, and it unnerved him. He tried to hum a cheery tune, but by the time it returned to him it was a hollow dirge and he stopped.

His mind was suddenly full of images from the story that Slartibartfast had been telling him. He half expected suddenly to see lethal white robots step silently from the shadows and kill him. He caught his breath. They didn’t. He let it go again. He didn’t know what he did expect.

Someone or something, however, seemed to be expecting him, for at that moment there lit up suddenly in the dark distance an eerie green neon sign.

It said, silently:

YOU HAVE BEEN DIVERTED

The sign flicked off again, in a way that Arthur was not at all certain he liked. It flicked off with a sort of contemptuous flourish. Arthur then tried to assure himself that this was just a ridiculous trick of his imagination. A neon sign is either on or off, depending on whether it has electricity running through it or not. There was no way, he told himself, that it could possibly effect the transition from one state to the other with a contemptuous flourish. He hugged himself tightly in his dressing gown and shivered, nevertheless.

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