Chapter 24
“Er, captain…”
“Yes, Number One?”
“Just heard a sort of report thingy from Number Two.”
“Oh, dear.”
High up in the bridge of the ship, the Captain stared out into the infinite reaches of space with mild irritation. From where he reclined beneath a wide domed bubble he could see before and above them the vast panorama of stars through which they were moving – a panorama that had thinned out noticably during the course of the voyage. Turning and looking backwards, over the vast two-mile bulk of the ship he could see the far denser mass of stars behind them which seemed to form almost a solid band. This was the view through the Galactic centre from which they were travelling, and indeed had been travelling for years, at a speed that he couldn’t quite remember at the moment, but he knew it was terribly fast. It was something approaching the speed of something or other, or was it three times the speed of something else? Jolly impressive anyway. He peered into the bright distance behind the ship, looking for something. He did this every few minutes or so, but never found what he was looking for. He didn’t let it worry him though. The scientist chaps had been very insistent that everything was going to be perfectly alright providing nobody panicked and everybody got on and did their bit in an orderly fashion.
He wasn’t panicking. As far as he was concerned everything was going splendidly. He dabbed at his shoulder with a large frothy sponge. It crept back into his mind that he was feeling mildly irritated about something. Now what was all that about? A slight cough alerted him to the fact that the ship’s first officer was still standing nearby.
Nice chap, Number One. Not of the very brightest, had the odd spot of difficulty doing up his shoe laces, but jolly good officer material for all that. The Captain wasn’t a man to kick a chap when he was bending over trying to do up his shoe laces, however long it took him. Not like that ghastly Number Two, strutting about all over the place, polishing his buttons, issuing reports every hour: “Ship’s still moving, Captain.” “Still on course, Captain.” “Oxygen levels still being maintained, Captain.” “Give it a miss,” was the Captain’s vote. Ah yes, that was the thing that had been irritating him. He peered down at Number One.
“Yes, Captain, he was shouting something or other about having found some prisoners…”
The Captain thought about this. Seemed pretty unlikely to him, but he wasn’t one to stand in his officers’ way.
“Well, perhaps that’ll keep him happy for a bit,” he said, “He’s always wanted some.”
Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent trudged onwards up the ship’s apparently endless corridors. Number Two marched behind them barking the occasional order about not making any false moves or trying any funny stuff. They seemed to have passed at least a mile of continuous brown hessian wall weave. Finally they reached a large steel door which slid open when Number Two shouted at it.
They entered. To the eyes of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, the most remarkable thing about the ship’s bridge was not the fifty foot diameter hemispherical dome which covered it, and through which the dazzling display of stars shone down on them: to people who have eaten at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, such wonders are commonplace. Nor was it the bewildering array of instruments that crowded the long circumferential wall around them. To Arthur this was exactly what spaceships were traditionally supposed to look like, and to Ford it looked thoroughly antiquated: it confirmed his suspicions that Disaster Area’s stuntship had taken them back at least a million, if not two million, years before their own time.
No, the thing that really caught them off balance was the bath.
The bath stood on a six foot pedestal of rough hewn blue water crystal and was of a baroque monstrosity not often seen outside the Maximegalon Museum of Diseased Imaginings. An intestinal jumble of plumbing had been picked out in gold leaf rather than decently buried at midnight in an unmarked grave; the taps and shower attachment would have made a gargoyle jump.
As the dominant centrepiece of a starship bridge it was terribly wrong, and it was with the embittered air of a man who knew this that Number Two approached it.
“Captain, sir!” he shouted through clenched teeth – a difficult trick but he’d had years during which to perfect it.
A large genial face and a genial foam covered arm popped up above the rim of the monstrous bath.