letters had been blurred with an airbrush, "so as not to spoil
the Big Surprise!" it said on the reverse.
"Do you know what the message is?" they asked the wizened little
lady in the booth.
"Oh yes," she piped cheerily, "oh yes!"
She waved them on.
Every twenty miles or so there was a little stone hut with
showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the
high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain, and the Great Red
Plain rippled in the heat.
"Is it possible," asked Arthur at one of the larger booths, "to
rent one of those little scooters? Like the one Lajestic
Ventrawhatsit had."
"The scooters," said the little lady who was serving at an ice
cream bar, "are not for the devout."
"Oh well, that's easy then," said Fenchurch, "we're not
particularly devout. We're just interested."
"Then you must turn back now," said the little lady severely, and
when they demurred, sold them a couple of Final Message sunhats
and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around each
other on the Great Red Plain of Rars.
They drank a couple of sodas in the shade of the booth and then
trudged out into the sun again.
"We're running out of border cream," said Fenchurch after a few
more miles. "We can go to the next booth, or we can return to the
previous one which is nearer, but means we have to retrace our
steps again."
They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the heat
haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on.
They then discovered that they were not only not the first ones
to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making
it now.
Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape was heaving itself
wretchedly along the ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half-
limping, half-crawling.
It was moving so slowly that before too long they caught the
creature up and could see that it was made of worn, scarred and
twisted metal.
It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in the hot
dry dust.
"So much time," it groaned, "oh so much time. And pain as well,
so much of that, and so much time to suffer it in too. One or the
other on its own I could probably manage. It's the two together
that really get me down. Oh hello, you again."
"Marvin?" said Arthur sharply, crouching down beside it. "Is that
you?"
"You were always one," groaned the aged husk of the robot, "for
the super-intelligent question, weren't you?"
"What is it?" whispered Fenchurch in alarm, crouching behind
Arthur, and grasping on to his arm. "He's sort of an old friend,"
said Arthur. "I ..."
"Friend!" croaked the robot pathetically. The word died away in a
kind of crackle and flakes of rust fell out of its mouth. "You'll
have to excuse me while I try and remember what the word means.
My memory banks are not what they were you know, and any word
which falls into disuse for a few zillion years has to get
shifted down into auxiliary memory back-up. Ah, here it comes."
The robot's battered head snapped up a bit as if in thought.
"Hmm," he said, "what a curious concept."
He thought a little longer.
"No," he said at last, "don't think I ever came across one of
those. Sorry, can't help you there."
He scraped a knee along pathetically in the dust, an then tried
to twist himself up on his misshapen elbows.
"Is there any last service you would like me to perform for you
perhaps?" he asked in a kind of hollow rattle. "A piece of paper
that perhaps you would like me to pick up for you? Or maybe you
would like me," he continued, "to open a door?"
His head scratched round in its rusty neck bearings and seemed to
scan the distant horizon.
"Don't seem to be any doors around at present," he said, "but I'm
sure that if we waited long enough, someone would build one. And
then," he said slowly twisting his head around to see Arthur
again, "I could open it for you. I'm quite used to waiting you
know."
"Arthur," hissed Fenchurch in his ear sharply, "you never told me
of this. What have you done to this poor creature?"
"Nothing," insisted Arthur sadly, "he's always like this ..."
"Ha!" snapped Marvin. "Ha!" he repeated. "What do you know of
always? You say `always' to me, who, because of the silly little
errands your organic lifeforms keep on sending me through time
on, am now thirty-seven times older than the Universe itself?
Pick your words with a little more care," he coughed, "and tact."
He rasped his way through a coughing fit and resumed.
"Leave me," he said, "go on ahead, leave me to struggle painfully
on my way. My time at last has nearly come. My race is nearly
run. I fully expect," he said, feebly waving them on with a
broken finger, "to come in last. It would be fitting. Here I am,
brain the size ..."
Between them they picked him up despite his feeble protests and
insults. The metal was so hot it nearly blistered their fingers,
but he weighed surprisingly little, and hung limply between their
arms.
They carried him with them along the path that ran along the left
of the Great Red Plain of Rars toward the encircling mountains of
Quentulus Quazgar.
Arthur attempted to explain to Fenchurch, but was too often
interrupted by Marvin's dolorous cybernetic ravings.
They tried to see if they could get him some spare parts at one
of the booths, but Marvin would have none of it.
"I'm all spare parts," he droned.
"Let me be!" he groaned.
"Every part of me," he moaned, "has been replaced at least fifty
times ... except ..." He seemed almost imperceptibly to brighten
for a moment. His head bobbed between them with the effort of
memory. "Do you remember, the first time you ever met me," he
said at last to Arthur. "I had been given the intellect-
stretching task of taking you up to the bridge? I mentioned to
you that I had this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left
side? That I had asked for them to be replaced but they never
were?"
He left a longish pause before he continued. They carried him on
between them, under the baking sun that hardly ever seemed to
move, let alone set.
"See if you can guess," said Marvin, when he judged that the
pause had become embarrassing enough, "which parts of me were
never replaced? Go on, see if you can guess.
"Ouch," he added, "ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch."
At last they reached the last of the little booths, set down
Marvin between them and rested in the shade. Fenchurch bought
some cufflinks for Russell, cufflinks that had set in them little
polished pebbles which had been picked up from the Quentulus
Quazgar Mountains, directly underneath the letters of fire in
which was written God's Final Message to His Creation.
Arthur flipped through a little rack of devotional tracts on the
counter, little meditations on the meaning of the Message.
"Ready?" he said to Fenchurch, who nodded.
They heaved up Marvin between them.
They rounded the foot of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, and
there was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest
of the Mountain. There was a little observation vantage point
with a rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from
which you could get a good view. It had a little pay-telescope
for looking at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use
it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance of the
heavens and would, if seen through a telescope, have severely
damaged the retina and optic nerve.
They gazed at God's Final Message in wonderment, and were slowly
and ineffably filled with a great sense of peace, and of final
and complete understanding.
Fenchurch sighed. "Yes," she said, "that was it."
They had been staring at it for fully ten minutes before they
became aware that Marvin, hanging between their shoulders, was in
difficulties. The robot could no longer lift his head, had not
read the message. They lifted his head, but he complained that
his vision circuits had almost gone.
They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He complained
and insulted them, but they helped him look at each individual
letter in turn, The first letter was a "w", the second an "e".
Then there was a gap. An "a" followed, then a "p", an "o" and an
"l".
Marvin paused for a rest.
After a few moments they resumed and let him see the "o", the
"g", the "i", the "s" and the "e".
The next two words were "for" and "the". The last one was a long
one, and Marvin needed another rest before he could tackle it.
It started with an "i", then "n" then a "c". Next came an "o" and
an "n", followed by a "v", an "e", another "n" and an "i".
After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength for the last
stretch.
He read the "e", the "n", the "c" and at last the final "e", and
staggered back into their arms.
"I think," he murmured at last, from deep within his corroding
rattling thorax, "I feel good about it."
The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time
ever.
Luckily, there was a stall nearby where you could rent scooters
from guys with green wings.
=================================================================
Epilogue
One of the greatest benefactors of all lifekind was a man who
couldn't keep his mind on the job in hand.
Brilliant?
Certainly.
One of the foremost genetic engineers of his or any other
generation, including a number he had designed himself?
Without a doubt.
The problem was that he was far too interested in things which he
shouldn't be interested in, at least, as people would tell him,
not now.
He was also, partly because of this, of a rather irritable
disposition.
So when his world was threatened by terrible invaders from a
distant star, who were still a fair way off but travelling fast,
he, Blart Versenwald III (his name was Blart Versenwald III,
which is not strictly relevant, but quite interesting because -
never mind, that was his name and we can talk about why it's
interesting later), was sent into guarded seclusion by the
masters of his race with instructions to design a breed of
fanatical superwarriors to resist and vanquish the feared
invaders, do it quickly and, they told him, "Concentrate!"
So he sat by a window and looked out at a summer lawn and
designed and designed and designed, but inevitably got a little
distracted by things, and by the time the invaders were
practically in orbit round them, had come up with a remarkable
new breed of super-fly that could, unaided, figure out how to fly
through the open half of a half-open window, and also an off-
switch for children. Celebrations of these remarkable
achievements seemed doomed to be shortlived because disaster was
imminent as the alien ships were landing. But astoundingly, the
fearsome invaders who, like most warlike races were only on the
rampage because they couldn't cope with things at home, were
stunned by Versenwald's extraordinary breakthroughs, joined in
the celebrations and were instantly prevailed upon to sign a
wide-ranging series of trading agreements and set up a programme
of cultural exchanges. And, in an astonishing reversal of normal
practice in the conduct of such matters, everybody concerned
lived happily ever after.
There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped
the chronicler's mind.
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