Volume 2 - The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe by Douglas Adams Page B

bewildered, he felt lonely, he felt unloved. Eventually he felt he ought to get whatever it was over with.
    He looked around the cracked and broken room. The wall had split round the door frame, and the door hung open. The window, by some miracle, was closed and unbroken. For a while he hesitated, then he thought that if his strange and recent companion had been through all that he had been through just to tell him what he had told him, then there must be a good reason for it. With Marvin’s help he got the window open. Outside it, the cloud of dust aroused by the crash, and the hulks of the other buildings with which this one was surrounded, effectively prevented Zaphod from seeing anything of the world outside.
    Not that this concerned him unduly. His main concern was what he saw when he looked down. Zarniwoop’s office was on the fifteenth floor. The building had landed at a tilt of about forty-five degrees, but still the descent looked heart-stopping.
    Eventually, stung by the continuous series of contemptuous looks that Marvin appeared to be giving him, he took a deep breath and clambered out on to the steeply inclined side of the building. Marvin followed him, and together they began to crawl slowly and painfully down the fifteen floors that separated them from the ground.
    As he crawled, the dank air and dust choked his lungs, his eyes smarted and the terrific distance down made his heads spin.
    The occasional remark from Marvin of the order of “This is the sort of thing you life forms enjoy, is it? I ask merely for information,” did little to improve his state of mind.
    About halfway down the side of the shattered building they stopped to rest. It seemed to Zaphod as he lay there panting with fear and exhaustion that Marvin seemed a mite more cheerful than usual. Eventually he realized this wasn’t so. The robot just seemed cheerful in comparison with his own mood.
    A large, scraggy black bird came flapping through the slowly settling clouds of dust and, stretching down its scrawny legs, landed on an inclined window ledge a couple of yards from Zaphod. It folded its ungainly wings and teetered awkwardly on its perch.
    Its wingspan must have been something like six feet, and its head and neck seemed curiously large for a bird. Its face was flat, the beak underdeveloped, and halfway along the underside of its wings the vestiges of something handlike could be clearly seen.
    In fact, it looked almost human.
    It turned its heavy eyes on Zaphod and clicked its beak in a desultory fashion.
    “Go away,” said Zaphod.
    “Okay,” muttered the bird morosely and flapped off into the dust again.
    Zaphod watched its departure in bewilderment.
    “Did that bird just talk to me?” he asked Marvin nervously. He was quite prepared to believe the alternative explanation, that he was in fact hallucinating.
    “Yes,” confirmed Marvin.
    “Poor souls,” said a deep, ethereal voice in Zaphod’s ear.
    Twisting around violently to find the source of the voice nearly caused Zaphod to fall off the building. He grabbed savagely at a protruding window fitting and cut his hand on it. He hung on, breathing heavily.
    The voice had no visible source whatsoever—there was no one there. Nevertheless, it spoke again.
    “A tragic history behind them, you know. A terrible blight.”
    Zaphod looked wildly about. The voice was deep and quiet. In other circumstances it would even be described as soothing. There is, however, nothing soothing about being addressed by a disembodied voice out of nowhere, particularly when you are, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, not at your best and hanging from a ledge eight stories up a crashed building.
    “Hey, er …” he stammered.
    “Shall I tell you their story?” inquired the voice quietly.
    “Hey, who are you?” panted Zaphod. “Where are you?”
    “Later then, perhaps,” murmured the voice. “I am Gargravarr. I am the Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex.”
    “Why can’t I see …?”
    “You