“Santa Zarquana Voostra!” exclaimed both of Zaphod’s heads in chorus. “So safe that you have to build a zarking fortress ship to take the by-products to the nearest black hole and tip them in! Only it doesn’t get there because the pilot does a detour—is this right?—to pick up some lobster? Okay, so the guy is cool, but . . . I mean own up, this is barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical mass, this is . . . this is . . . total vocabulary failure!

“Shut up!” his right head yelled at his left. “We’re flanging!”

He got a good calming grip on the remaining beer can.

“Listen, guys,” he resumed after a moment’s peace and contemplation. The two officials had said nothing. Conversation at this level was not something to which they felt they could aspire. “I just want to know,” insisted Zaphod, “what you’re getting me into here.”

He stabbed a finger at the intermittent readings trickling over the computer screen. They meant nothing to him, but he didn’t like the look of them at all. They were all squiggly, with lots of long numbers and things.

“It’s breaking up, is that it?” he shouted. “It’s got a hold full of epsilonic radiating aorist rods or something that’ll fry this whole space sector for zillions of years back, and it’s breaking up. Is that the story? Is that what we’re going down to find? Am I going to come out of that wreck with even more heads?”

“It cannot possibly be a wreck, Mr. Beeblebrox,” insisted the official. “The ship is guaranteed to be perfectly safe. It cannot possibly break up.”

“Then why are you so keen to go and look at it?”

“We like to look at things that are perfectly safe.”

“Freeeooow!”

“Mr. Beeblebrox,” said the official patiently, “may I remind you that you have a job to do?”

“Yeah, well maybe I don’t feel so keen on doing it all of a sudden. What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those moral things?”

“Scruples?”

“Scruples, thank you, whatsoever? Well?”

The two officials waited calmly. They coughed slightly to help pass the time.

Zaphod sighed a what-is-the-world-coming-to sort of sigh to absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat.

“Ship?” he called.

“Yup?” said the ship.

“Do what I do.”

The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double-checking all the seals on its heavy-duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.

Five hundred feet.

A thousand.

Two thousand.

Here, at a pressure of nearly seventy atmospheres, in the chilling depths where no light reaches, nature keeps its most heated imaginings. Two-foot-long nightmares loomed wildly into the bleaching light, yawned, and vanished back into the blackness.

Two and a half thousand feet.