The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Руководство для путешествующих автостопом по Галактике. Дуглас АдамсЧитать онлайн книгу.
sake[57], mankind, it’s only four light years away! I’m sorry, but if you don’t take any interest in the local affairs, that’s your own problem. Energize the demolition beams.”
Light poured out of the hatchways.
“I don’t know,” said the voice on the PA again, “bloody apathetic planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.” It cut off.[58]
There was a terrible silence.
There was a terrible noise.
There was a terrible silence.
The Vogon Constructor fleet moved away into the black starry void.
Chapter 4
Far away, at the other end of the Galaxy, five hundred thousand light years from the star Sol, Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, sped across the seas of Damogran in his ion-drive[59] delta-boat. Damogran the hot; Damogran the remote; Damogran the almost totally unknown.
Damogran – the secret home of the Heart of Gold.
The boat sped on across the water. Damogran is such an inconveniently arranged planet. It consists only of large desert islands separated by very pretty but annoyingly wide oceans.
The boat sped on and on.
Because of this inconvenient arrangement Damogran has always been a deserted planet. This is why the Imperial Galactic Government chose Damogran for the Heart of Gold project, because it was so deserted and the Heart of Gold was so secret.
The boat sped across the sea, the sea that lay between the main islands of the only archipelago on the whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (by coincidence, in Galacticspeke[60], easter means “small, flat and light brown”) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another coincidence was called France.
But it was not a coincidence that today, the day of culmination of the project, the great day when the Heart of Gold would finally be introduced to the Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the President[61], a decision which had shocked everyone in the Imperial Galaxy – Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the [62] Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President?
Many had decided that the whole Creation had finally gone crazy. Zaphod Beeblebrox – adventurer, ex-hippy, good-timer, manic self-publicist[63], terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out of his mind[64] – President?
Yes, President.
Full title: President of the Imperial Galactic Government. The term Imperial is kept though the real Emperor is almost dead and has been so for many centuries. In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a stasis field[65] which simply keeps him in this state. All his heirs are now long dead, and this means that power has simply and effectively moved to the Governmental Assembly and a President elected by that Assembly.
The President is actually a figurehead – he has no real power whatsoever. He is chosen by the government, but the President is always a strange choice, always a fascinating character. His job is to draw attention away from the power. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had – he has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud.
Very, very few people realize that the President and the Government have no power at all, and of these very few people only six know whom the political power belongs to. Most of the others secretly believe that the decision-making is done by a computer. They can’t be more wrong.[66]
So only six people in the Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his plan to run for President it was more or less done: he was the ideal candidate.
What they failed to understand was why Zaphod was doing it.
Zaphod grinned and sped up the boat. Today was the day. Today was the day when they would realize what Zaphod had been planning. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox’s Presidency was all about. Today was also his two-hundredth birthday, but that was just another coincidence.
As he steered his boat across the seas of Damogran he smiled quietly to himself about what a wonderful exciting day it was going to be. He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily along the back of his seat, steering with an extra arm he’d recently fitted just below his right one.
“Hey,” he said to himself, “you’re a real cool boy, you know.”
But he was still nervous.
The island of France was about twenty miles long, five miles wide, sandy and crescent shaped, forming a huge bay. Its coastline was mostly cliffs. On top of the cliffs stood the reception committee. It consisted of the engineers and researchers who had built the Heart of Gold – mostly humanoid, but here and there were a few reptiloids, two or three green maximegalacticans, an octopoid or two, and a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue). All except the Hooloovoo were wearing their multicolored lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been shaped into a prism for the occasion.
All of them were excited and thrilled.
Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.
The crowd gasped[67] as the shiny Presidential speedboat entered the bay, splashing water in every direction. In fact, it didn’t need to touch the water at all because it was running on a cushion of ionized atoms – but just for effect it had thin blades which could be lowered into the water.
Zaphod loved effect: it was what he was best at.
He turned the wheel sharply, the boat spun around wildly and stopped on the rocking waves.
Zaphod ran out onto the deck and waved and grinned at over three billion people. The three billion people weren’t actually there, but they watched his every move through the eyes of a small robot tri-D camera which hovered in the air nearby. The antics of the President always made amazingly popular tri-D; that’s what they were for.
Zaphod grinned again.
Three billion and six people didn’t know it, but today they would see the biggest antic ever.
The robot camera gave a close-up of the more popular of the President’s two heads and he waved again. He was mostly humanoid in appearance except for the extra head and third arm. His fair hair stuck out in every direction, his blue eyes shone, and his chins were almost always unshaven.
A huge transparent globe floated next to his boat, rolling and shining in the brilliant sun. Inside it there was a wide red leather sofa: the more the globe rolled on the waves, the more the sofa stayed perfectly still.
Again, all was done for effect.
Zaphod stepped through the wall of the globe and relaxed on the sofa. He spread his two arms lazily along the back and with the third one he brushed some dust off his knee. His heads looked around, smiling.
Water boiled up under the globe. The globe went up in the air. Up, up it climbed.
Zaphod smiled, picturing himself.
At the top of the cliff the globe hovered for a moment, then rolled down a small platform and stopped.
To great applause Zaphod Beeblebrox stepped out of the globe.
The President of the Galaxy had arrived.
He waited for the applause to die
бога ради
Вещание прекратилось.
именно ради этого дня он и решил баллотироваться в президенты
тот самый
искатель приключений, экс-хиппи, любитель поотрываться, маниакальный саморекламщик
с поехавшей крышей
Стазисное квантовое поле, в котором время не властно над объектом
Они как никогда далеки от истины.
толпа ахнула