h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The amazing flying snail, having adopted his (still rather slimy and squat) humanoid form, finds that only by setting his shoulder against the heavy, forbidding door and pushing with legs can he nudge it ajar. The door opens only enough to allow him to squeeze inside. In the half-light he determines that it is the corroded and grimy state of the hinges that were holding it shut, and which now hold prevent it closing again.

As Hoversnail edges into the room, his feet kick against litter spilled from an overturned waste-paper basket. He can make out rows of benches. The room seems large and filled with dark, unfamiliar shapes. Hoversnail runs the beam of his torch over the walls, illuminating shelves piled up with antiquated equipment, barrels and boxes. In one corner there is a cage filled with tall gas-bottles and a couple of large cylindrical tanks. The torch passes over the benches, cluttered to the edges with jars and bottles, books and other paraphernalia, all unified into a grey mass by a thick layer of dust and cobwebs.

On the far wall, above a steel cabinet marked with strange warning signs appears to be a power-box. Hoversnail makes his way over to it. Careful not to upset the enormous glass bottles bound in mouldy wicker that sit atop the cabinet, Hoversnail climbs up and grabs the large handle on the front of the power-box. With an echoing clank, the handle snaps into the 'on' position leaving a deep, electric hum in the air. One by one, lights blink high up in the ceiling, as if waking from a long sleep. Around the room, equipment clicks into life and transformers begin to buzz. On a far bench a set of prisms, undulled by time, traces a circuit in laser-light through newly disturbed dust. It is immediately clear what this room is, though disused and having been allowed to fall into disrepair. The partially dissected frog, still pinned to a block and mummified in dust, the rows of microscopes, some with specimens still in place on their stages, a faded periodic table, its familiar shape glimpsed behind the cascading tendrils of a long-dead spider plant high on one of the walls, all pay testament to what this place once was and could be again.

Hoversnail soon finds a broom and begins to clean up the research lab.