After a moment or so Ford told him to stand back. He tossed a coin into the teleport and jiggled a switch on the lolling control panel. With a crackle and spit of light, the coin vanished.
“That much of it works,” said Ford, “however, there is no guidance system. A matter transference teleport without guidance programming could put you… well, anywhere.”
The sun of Kakrafoon loomed huge on the screen.
“Who cares,” said Zaphod, “we go where we go.”
“And,” said Ford, “there is no autosystem. We couldn’t all go. Someone would have to stay and operate it.”
A solemn moment shuffled past. The sun loomed larger and larger.
“Hey, Marvin kid,” said Zaphod brightly, “how you doing?”
“Very badly I suspect,” muttered Marvin.
A shortish while later, the concert on Kakrafoon reached an unexpected climax.
The black ship with its single morose occupant had plunged on schedule into the nuclear furnace of the sun. Massive solar flares licked out from it millions of miles into space, thrilling and in a few cases spilling the dozen or so Flare Riders who had been coasting close to the surface of the sun in anticipation of the moment. Moments before the flare light reached Kakrafoon the pounding desert cracked along a deep faultline. A huge and hitherto undetected underground river lying far beneath the surface gushed to the surface to be followed seconds later by the eruption of millions of tons of boiling lava that flowed hundreds of feet into the air, instantaneously vaporizing the river both above and below the surface in an explosion that echoed to the far side of the world and back again.
Those – very few – who witnessed the event and survived swear that the whole hundred thousand square miles of the desert rose into the air like a mile-thick pancake, flipped itself over and fell back down. At that precise moment the solar radiation from the flares filtered through the clouds of vaporized water and struck the ground.
A year later, the hundred thousand square mile desert was thick with flowers. The structure of the atmosphere around the planet was subtly altered. The sun blazed less harshly in the summer, the cold bit less bitterly in the winter, pleasant rain fell more often, and slowly the desert world of Kakrafoon became a paradise. Even the telepathic power with which the people of Kakrafoon had been cursed was permanently dispersed by the force of the explosion.
A spokesman for Disaster Area – the one who had had all the environmentalists shot – was later quoted as saying that it had been “a good gig”.
Many people spoke movingly of the healing powers of music. A few sceptical scientists examined the records of the events more closely, and claimed that they had discovered faint vestiges of a vast artificially induced Improbability Field drifting in from a nearby region of space.