“Nice chandeliers though,” said Trillian.
They looked about themselves in bemusement.
“It’s not so much an afterlife,” said Arthur, “more a sort of apres vie.”
The chandeliers were in fact a little on the flashy side and the low vaulted ceiling from which they hung would not, in an ideal Universe, have been painted in that particular shade of deep turquoise, and even if it had been it wouldn’t have been highlighted by concealed moodlighting. This is not, however, an ideal Universe, as was further evidenced by the eye-crossing patterns of the inlaid marble floor, and the way in which the fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made. The fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in.
A few smartly dressed creatures were lounging casually at the bar or relaxing in the richly coloured body-hugging seats that were deployed here and there about the bar area. A young Vl’Hurg officer and his green steaming young lady passed through the large smoked glass doors at the far end of the bar into the dazzling light of the main body of the Restaurant beyond.
Behind Arthur was a large curtained bay window. He pulled aside the corner of the curtain and looked out at a landscape which under normal circumstances would have given Arthur the creeping horrors. These were not, however, normal circumstances, for the thing that froze his blood and made his skin try to crawl up his back and off the top of his head was the sky. The sky was…
An attendant flunkey politely drew the curtain back into place.
“All in good time, sir,” he said.
Zaphod’s eyes flashed.
“Hey, hang about you dead guys,” he said, “I think we’re missing some ultra-important thing here you know. Something somebody said and we missed it.”
Arthur was profoundly relieved to turn his attention from what he had just seen.
He said, “I said it was a sort of apres…”
“Yeah, and don’t you wish you hadn’t?” said Zaphod, “Ford?”
“I said it was odd.”
“Yeah, shrewd but dull, perhaps it was…”