CHAPTER 24

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end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultra violet.

Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes.

“Earthman,” he said, “we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea.”

“How did you know I was an Earthman?” demanded Arthur.

“These things will become clear to you,” said the old man gently, “at least,” he added with slight doubt in his voice, “clearer than they are at the moment.”

He continued: “I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too. . . large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you.”

Arthur made nervous noises.

Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly. “It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight.”

The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like. It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very big, so that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself. Arthur’s senses bobbed and span, as, travelling at the immense speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed slowly through the open air leaving the gateway through which they had passed an invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them.

The wall.

The wall defied the imagination – seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so paralysingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of vertigo could kill a man. The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either side, it also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light.

“Welcome,” said Slartibartfast as the tiny speck that was the aircar, travelling now at three times the speed of sound, crept imperceptibly forward into the mindboggling space, “welcome,” he said, “to our factory floor.”

Arthur stared about him in a kind of wonderful horror. Ranged away 99