"An automatic system," he said and gave a small sigh. "Ancient computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks. I think they take the occasional pot shot to relieve the monotony."
He looked gravely at Arthur and said, "I'm a great fan of science you know."
"Oh ... er, really?" said Arthur, who was beginning to find the man's curious, kindly manner disconcerting.
"Oh, yes," said the old man, and simply stopped talking again.
"Ah," said Arthur, "er ..." He had an odd felling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.
"You seem ill at ease," said the old man with polite concern.
"Er, no ... well, yes. Actually you see, we weren't really expecting to find anybody about in fact. I sort of gathered that you were all dead or something ..."
"Dead?" said the old man. "Good gracious no, we have but slept."
"Slept?" said Arthur incredulously.
"Yes, through the economic recession you see," said the old man, apparently unconcerned about whether Arthur understood a word he was talking about or not.
"Er, economic recession?"
"Well you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-made planets are something of a luxury commodity you see ..."
He paused and looked at Arthur.
"You know we built planets do you?" he asked solemnly.
"Well yes," said Arthur, "I'd sort of gathered ..."
"Fascinating trade," said the old man, and a wistful look came into his eyes, "doing the coastlines was always my favourite. Used to have endless fun doing the little bits in fjords ... so anyway," he said trying to find his thread again, "the recession came and we decided it would save us a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over."
The man stifled a very slight yawn and continued. "The computers were index linked to the Galactic stock market prices you see, so that we'd all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services."
Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.
"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave isn't it?"
"Is it?" asked the old man mildly. "I'm sorry, I'm a bit out of touch."