"Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha is gone forever."
The horror in those words! It was a horror that crept out of the panties of ugly women, slunk around the breath of the intoxicated, and kicked nice old ladies in the shin. It was the end of the universe, and the only race not worried about the incoming catastrophe was the Vogons.
"What do you mean, the universe is going to end? You can always go to Milliways!" Snorted an irate Vogon spokesman to the media swarm that surrounded the Vogon-controlled Department of Interstellar Transportation. "I will now read from my own personal book of poetry…"
He didn't finish his sentence, because he didn't need to. The room, full of young, eager reporters willing to put up with the sheer bluntness of the Vogon race had suddenly and simultaneously remembered that the water was on in the spaceship. Heck, even the podium and the stage, and indeed the entire planet Vogsphere had fled from the threat. The Vogon spokesman found himself floating in an inky whiteness that he slowly dissolved into, furiously arching his unibrow over the incredible universe-end that was swallowing him up like a cow at a python convention.
An aged man with an improbable name sat bent over the controls of the starship Bistromath, the data readout perplexing him to the point that his craggy face became long and drawn. His visage, memorialized in the ice fields of the island of Norway, on the tiny little backwater Earth, located in the unfashionable end of the western spiral galaxy, had just been permanently obliterated from the face of the universe. Which of course rendered his first-place award for sculpting said features totally useless. Worse less than the braincase of a dead salmon.
Slartibartfast wanted his image back. Which of course meant that he would have to find some way to resurrect Earth, and indeed the entire plural sectors of the galaxy.
*
Arthur felt that of all the worst possible places he could be, this one was surely the worst. Not only was he trapped forever in the explosion of earth –AGAIN- but there was Ford's insane laughter to deal with. So he was bombarded by the physical sensation of being ripped apart, his eye sockets burned out form the brightness of everything, and the din of the massive explosion continuously ringing in his ears. Yet above all of this noise and confusion and pain, pain to a degree that froze Arthur in his tracks like a squirrel in headlights, there was Ford's deranged chuckling.
It takes a great deal of self-confidence to chuckle like that in the middle of the earth's explosion, Arthur reassured himself. Sooner or later, Ford will stop, and so will these penguins. Wait… penguins?
Indeed, penguins. Far of on the other side of the universal explosion of pang and terror, a group of penguins were waddling around a small ice chunk that rode the shockwave of the explosion. At that instant, a massive squeegee that showed no sign of being affected by the explosion flapped by on gossamer insect wings. It mowed down a passing Yak with all the self pity of the three flashy cars that fought in a sudden corner. Dust bunnies ran down the humans that were writhing in pain, caught in the explosion, only to watch the bunnies turn into confetti and party hats that distributed themselves at random to the dazed and confused jumble of people trapped in the ceaseless explosion.
Arthur's mind sang in fear. What if I'm just insane, and only think all of this is happening, and I go on to meet some other, even worse end? What if I am destined to go on, like Marvin, into catastrophe after catastrophe, and end up 46 times older than the universe itself? The hills are alive!... With the sound of Music!!
And then it happened. Arthur was sure he had lost it when a sleek running-shoe ship whizzed by, someone stuck both of his heads out, and used all three of his arms to grab Arthur, Ford, and Trillian from the monstrous tableau that grew more monstrous by the second as small white rabbits rained in random directions and collected in small aggregations of rabid hate.