The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Руководство для путешествующих автостопом по Галактике. Дуглас АдамсЧитать онлайн книгу.
Beeblebrox would not need his prepared speech this time.
“Hi,” he said again.
Everyone smiled at him, or, at least, almost everyone. He saw Trillian in the crowd. Trillian was a girl that Zaphod had picked up recently while visiting a planet, just for fun, incognito. She was slim, humanoid, with long black hair, a full mouth, a strange little nose and ridiculously brown eyes. Trillian wasn’t anybody special, or so Zaphod said. She just went around with him a lot and told him what she thought of him.
“Hi honey,” he said to her.
She gave him a quick smile and looked away. Then she looked back for a moment and smiled more warmly – but by this time he was looking at something else.
“Hi,” Zaphod said to a small group of creatures from the press who were standing nearby, wishing that he would stop saying “hi” and give his speech which they could quote.
He grinned at them because he knew that in a few moments he would be giving them one hell of a quote[68].
The next thing he said though was not a lot of use to them either.
One of the officials had decided that the President was clearly not in a mood to read the speech that had been written for him, and had pressed a button on the remote control device[69] in his pocket. Away in front of them a huge white dome split in the middle and slowly opened. Everyone gasped although they had known perfectly well it was going to do that because they had built it that way.
Beneath the dome there was a huge starship, one hundred and fifty meters long, shaped like a running shoe, perfectly white and beautiful. At the heart of it, unseen, was a small gold box which contained a marvelous device that made this starship unique in the history of the Galaxy, a device after which the ship had been named – The Heart of Gold.
“Wow,” said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold.
There wasn’t much else he could say.
He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press. “Wow.”
The crowd turned their faces towards him, waiting. He winked at Trillian who raised her eyebrows. She knew what he was going to say and thought that he was a terrible showoff.
“That is really amazing,” Zaphod said. “That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing that I think I’d like to steal it.”
An absolutely marvelous Presidential quote. The crowd laughed, the newsmen happily pushed buttons on their Sub-Etha News-Matics, and the President grinned.
As he grinned he touched the small Paralyso-Matic bomb that lay quietly in his pocket.
Finally he couldn’t wait any longer. He lifted his heads up to the sky, let out a wild cry, threw the bomb to the ground and ran forward through the sea of suddenly frozen smiles.
Chapter 5
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz did not have pleasant looks, even for a Vogon. His huge nose rose high above his small piggy forehead. His dark green rubbery skin was thick and waterproof enough for him to survive at sea.
Not that he ever went swimming[70] of course. His busy schedule did not allow it. He was what he was because billions of years ago when the Vogons had first crawled out of the primeval seas of Vogsphere and had lain panting on the planet’s virgin shores, with the first rays of the bright Vogsol sun shining on them that morning… the evolution had simply given up on them there and then, turning away in disgust as if they were an ugly and unfortunate mistake. They never evolved again; they should never have survived.
The fact that they survived shows stubbornness of these creatures. Evolution? they said to themselves, Who needs it?, and what nature refused to do for them they simply did without[71] until the time they were able to solve some anatomical problems with surgery.
Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been working hard to make up for[72] their earlier mistake. They created jeweled crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets; tall colorful trees which the Vogons cut down and burned the crab meat with; elegant gazelle-like creatures which the Vogons caught and sat on. They were useless as transport, but the Vogons sat on them anyway, breaking their backs.
Thus the planet Vogsphere spent the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the possibility of interstellar travel. In a few short Vog years every Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis, the political hub of the Galaxy, and now formed the powerful Galactic Civil Service[73]. They have tried learning things, they have tried becoming more stylish and sociable, but mostly the modern Vogons are not that different from their primitive ancestors. Every year they import twenty-seven thousand jeweled crabs from their native planet and spend a happy drunken night smashing them to pieces with iron mallets.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was a typical Vogon.
Also, he did not like hitchhikers.
Somewhere in a small dark cabin deep in the Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz’s flagship, a small match was lit nervously. The owner of the match was not a Vogon, but he knew all about them and was right to be nervous. His name was Ford Prefect.
Ford Prefect’s original name is only pronounceable in a Betelgeusian dialect, now extinct since the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758 which destroyed all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford’s father was the only man on the whole planet who survived the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able to explain. The whole thing is a mystery: no one ever knew what a Hrung was or why it had fallen on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford’s father went to live on Betelgeuse Five where he both fathered and uncled Ford[74]
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