"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

“Life,theUniverse,andEverything”

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Life, the universe and everything

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"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 1

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of  Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.

It wasn't just that the cave was cold, it wasn't just that it was damp  and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn't a bus due for two million years.

Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in,  as  Arthur Dent  could  testify,  having  been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.

He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of  a  complex sequence of events which had involved him being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of  the  Galaxy  than  he ever  dreamt  existed,  and  though his life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.

He hadn't been blown up now for five years.

Since he had hardly seen anyone since he  and  Ford  Prefect  had parted  company four years previously, he hadn't been insulted in all that time either.

Except just once.

It had happened on a spring evening about two years previously.

He was returning to his cave just a little  after  dusk  when  he became  aware  of  lights  flashing eerily through the clouds. He turned and stared, with  hope  suddenly  clambering  through  his heart. Rescue. Escape. The castaway's impossible dream - a ship.

And as he watched, as he stared in wonder and excitement, a  long silver  ship  descended  through  the  warm evening air, quietly, without fuss, its long legs  unlocking  in  a  smooth  ballet  of technology.

It alighted gently on the ground, and  what  little  hum  it  had generated died away, as if lulled by the evening calm.

A ramp extended itself.

Light streamed out.

A tall figure appeared silhouetted in  the  hatchway.  It  walked down the ramp and stood in front of Arthur.

“You're a jerk, Dent,” it said simply.

It was alien, very alien. It had a  peculiar  alien  tallness,  a peculiar alien flattened head, peculiar slitty little alien eyes, extravagantly draped golden ropes with a peculiarly alien  collar design,  and  pale  grey-green alien skin which had about it that lustrous shine which most grey-green faces can only acquire  with plenty of exercise and very expensive soap.

Arthur boggled at it.

It gazed levelly at him.

Arthur's first sensations of hope and trepidation  had  instantly been  overwhelmed by astonishment, and all sorts of thoughts were battling for the use of his vocal chords at this moment.

“Whh ...?” he said.

“Bu ... hu ... uh ...” he added.

“Ru ... ra ... wah ... who?” he managed finally to say and lapsed into  a  frantic  kind  of silence. He was feeling the effects of having not said anything to anybody  for  as  long  as  he  could remember.

The alien creature frowned briefly and consulted what appeared to be some species of clipboard which he was holding in his thin and spindly alien hand.

“Arthur Dent?” it said.

Arthur nodded helplessly.

“Arthur Philip Dent?” pursued the alien in a  kind  of  efficient yap.

“Er ... er ... yes ... er ... er,” confirmed Arthur.

“You're a jerk,” repeated the alien, “a complete asshole.”

“Er ...”

The creature nodded to itself, made a peculiar alien tick on  its clipboard and turned briskly back towards the ship.

“Er ...” said Arthur desperately, “er ...”

“Don't give me that!” snapped the alien. It marched up the  ramp, through  the  hatchway  and  disappeared  into the ship. The ship sealed itself. It started to make a low throbbing hum.

“Er, hey!” shouted Arthur, and started to run helplessly  towards it.

“Wait a minute!” he called. “What is this? What? Wait a minute!”

The ship rose, as if shedding its weight  like  a  cloak  to  the ground,  and  hovered  briefly.  It  swept  strangely up into the evening sky. It passed up through the clouds,  illuminating  them briefly,  and then was gone, leaving Arthur alone in an immensity of land dancing a helplessly tiny little dance.

“What?” he screamed. “What? What? Hey, what? Come back  here  and say that!”

He jumped and danced until his legs trembled,  and  shouted  till his  lungs  rasped. There was no answer from anyone. There was no one to hear him or speak to him.

The alien ship was already thundering towards the  upper  reaches of  the  atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other.

Its occupant, the alien with  the  expensive  complexion,  leaned back  in  its  single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good  purpose, as  he  would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move.

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --indeed, is - one of  the Universe's very small number of immortal beings.

Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to  cope  with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He  had  had  his  immortality thrust  upon  him  by  an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber  bands.  The  precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact  circumstances  under which  it  happened,  and  many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.

Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim  and  weary  expression,  put some light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons,  he  really could have done.

To begin with it was fun, he  had  a  ball,  living  dangerously, taking  risks,  cleaning  up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't  cope  with, and  that  terrible  listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know  that  you've  had  all  the  baths  you  can usefully  have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it,  or  use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will  move  relentlessly  on  to four  o'clock,  and  you  will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular.

This was the point at which he conceived his purpose,  the  thing which  would  drive  him  on,  and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this.

He would insult the Universe.

That  is,  he  would  insult  everybody  in   it.   Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.

When people protested to him, as they sometimes  had  done,  that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying  all  the  time,  he would  merely  fix  them  with  a steely look and say, “A man can dream can't he?”

And so he started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built  to last   with  the  computer  capable  of  handling  all  the  data processing involved in keeping track of the entire population  of the  known  Universe and working out the horrifically complicated routes involved.

His ship fled through the inner orbits of the  Sol  star  system, preparing  to  slingshot  round the sun and fling itself out into interstellar space.

“Computer,” he said.

“Here,” yipped the computer.

“Where next?”

“Computing that.”

Wowbagger gazed for a moment at the fantastic  jewellery  of  the night,  the  billions  of  tiny  diamond  worlds  that dusted the infinite darkness with light. Every one, every single one, was on his  itinerary.  Most  of  them  he would be going to millions of times over.

He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in  the  sky  like  a child's numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very, very rude word.

The computer beeped tunelessly to indicate that it  had  finished its calculations.

“Folfanga,” it said. It beeped.

“Fourth world of the Folfanga system,” it  continued.  It  beeped again.

“Estimated journey time, three weeks,” it continued  further.  It beeped again.

“There to meet with a small slug,” it beeped, “of  the  genus  A-Rth-Urp-Hil-Ipdenu.”

“I believe,” it added, after  a  slight  pause  during  which  it beeped, “that you had decided to call it a brainless prat.”

Wowbagger grunted. He watched the majesty of creation outside his window for a moment or two.

“I think I'll take a nap,” he said, and then added, “what network areas are we going to be passing through in the next few hours?”

The computer beeped.

“Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box,” it said, and beeped.

“Any movies I haven't seen thirty thousand times already?”

“No.”

“Uh.”

“There's Angst in  Space.  You've  only  seen  that  thirty-three thousand five hundred and seventeen times.”

“Wake me for the second reel.”

The computer beeped.

“Sleep well,” it said.

The ship fled on through the night.

Meanwhile, on Earth, it began to pour with rain and  Arthur  Dent sat  in his cave and had one of the most truly rotten evenings of his entire life, thinking of things he could  have  said  to  the alien and swatting flies, who also had a rotten evening.

The next day he made himself a pouch out of rabbit  skin  because he thought it would be useful to keep things in.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 2

This morning, two years later than that, was sweet  and  fragrant as  he  emerged from the cave he called home until he could think of a better name for it or find a better cave.

Though his throat was sore again from his early morning  yell  of horror,  he  was suddenly in a terrifically good mood. He wrapped his dilapidated dressing gown tightly around him  and  beamed  at the bright morning.

The air was clear and scented, the breeze flitted lightly through the tall grass around his cave, the birds were chirruping at each other, the butterflies were  flitting  about  prettily,  and  the whole  of  nature seemed to be conspiring to be as pleasant as it possibly could.

It wasn't all the pastoral delights that were making Arthur  feel so  cheery, though. He had just had a wonderful idea about how to cope with the terrible  lonely  isolation,  the  nightmares,  the failure  of  all  his  attempts  at  horticulture,  and the sheer futurelessness and futility  of  his  life  here  on  prehistoric Earth, which was that he would go mad.

He beamed again and took a bite out of a  rabbit  leg  left  over from  his  supper.  He  chewed happily for a few moments and then decided formally to announce his decision.

He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the  fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arms out wide.

“I will go mad!” he announced.

“Good idea,” said Ford Prefect, clambering down from the rock  on which he had been sitting.

Arthur's brain somersaulted. His jaw did press-ups.

“I went mad for a while,” said Ford, “did me no end of good.”

“You see,” said Ford, “- ...”

“Where have you been?” interrupted Arthur, now that his head  had finished working out.

“Around,” said Ford, “around and about.” He grinned  in  what  he accurately  judged  to  be an infuriating manner. “I just took my mind off the hook for a bit. I reckoned that if the world  wanted me badly enough it would call back. It did.”

 He took out of his now terribly battered and dilapidated satchel his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic.

“At least,” he said, “I think it did. This has been playing up  a bit.”  He  shook it. “If it was a false alarm I shall go mad,” he said, “again.”

Arthur shook his head and sat down. He looked up.

“I thought you must be dead ...” he said simply.

“So did I for a while,” said Ford, “and then I decided  I  was  a lemon  for  a couple of weeks. A kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.”

Arthur cleared his throat, and then did it again.

“Where,” he said, “did you ...?”

“Find a gin and tonic?” said Ford brightly. “I found a small lake that  thought  it  was  a gin and tonic, and jumped in and out of that. At least, I think it thought it was a gin and tonic.”

“I may,” he added with a grin which  would  have  sent  sane  men scampering into trees, “have been imagining it.”

He waited for a reaction from Arthur, but Arthur knew better than that.

“Carry on,” he said levelly.

“The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is  no  point  in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.”

“And this is you sane again, is it?” said Arthur. “I  ask  merely for information.”

“I went to Africa,” said Ford.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“What was that like?”

“And this is your cave is it?” said Ford.

“Er, yes,” said Arthur. He felt very strange. After  nearly  four years  of  total  isolation he was so pleased and relieved to see Ford that he could almost cry. Ford was, on the  other  hand,  an almost immediately annoying person.

“Very nice,” said Ford, in reference to Arthur's cave. “You  must hate it.”

Arthur didn't bother to reply.

“Africa was very interesting,” said Ford, “I behaved  very  oddly there.”

He gazed thoughtfully into the distance.

“I took up being cruel to animals,” he said airily.  “But  only,” he added, “as a hobby.”

“Oh yes,” said Arthur, warily.

“Yes,” Ford assured him. "I won't disturb you  with  the  details

because they would -"

“What?”

“Disturb you. But you  may  be  interested  to  know  that  I  am singlehandedly  responsible  for  the evolved shape of the animal you came to know in later centuries as a giraffe. And I tried  to learn to fly. Do you believe me?”

“Tell me,” said Arthur.

“I'll tell you later. I'll just mention that the Guide says ...”

“The ...?”

“Guide. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You remember?”

“Yes. I remember throwing it in the river.”

“Yes,” said Ford, “but I fished it out.”

“You didn't tell me.”

“I didn't want you to throw it in again.”

“Fair enough,” admitted Arthur. “It says?”

“What?”

“The Guide says?”

“The Guide says there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a  knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” He smiled weakly. He pointed at  the  knees  of his  trousers  and held his arms up to show the elbows. They were all torn and worn through.

“I haven't done very well so far,” he  said.  He  stuck  out  his hand. “I'm very glad to see you again, Arthur,” he added.

Arthur  shook  his  head  in  a  sudden  access  of  emotion  and bewilderment.

“I haven't seen anyone for years,” he said, “not  anyone.  I  can hardly  even  remember  how  to speak. I keep forgetting words. I practise you see. I practise by talking to  ...  talking  to  ...  what  are  those  things  people think you're mad if you talk to?  Like George the Third.”

“Kings?” suggested Ford.

“No, no,” said Arthur. “The things he  used  to  talk  to.  We're surrounded  by  them  for  heaven's  sake.  I've planted hundreds myself. They all died. Trees! I practise  by  talking  to  trees.  What's that for?”

Ford still had his hand stuck  out.  Arthur  looked  at  it  with incomprehension.

“Shake,” prompted Ford.

Arthur did, nervously at first, as if it might turn out to  be  a fish.  Then  he  grasped  it  vigorously  with  both  hands in an overwhelming flood of relief. He shook it and shook it.

After a while Ford found it necessary to disengage. They  climbed to  the  top  of  a nearby outcrop of rock and surveyed the scene around them.

“What happened to the Golgafrinchans?” asked Ford.

Arthur shrugged.

“A lot of them didn't make it  through  the  winter  three  years ago,”  he said, “and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set off on a raft. History  says  that  they must have survived ...”

“Huh,” said Ford, “well well.” He stuck his hands on his hips and looked  round again at the empty world. Suddenly, there was about Ford a sense of energy and purpose.

“We're going,” he said excitedly, and shivered with energy.

“Where? How?” said Arthur.

“I don't know,” said Ford, “but I just  feel  that  the  time  is right. Things are going to happen. We're on our way.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper.

“I have detected,” he said, “disturbances in the wash.”

He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like  the  wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some  leaves  a  little way off.

Arthur asked him to repeat what  he  had  just  said  because  he hadn't quite taken his meaning. Ford repeated it.

“The wash?” said Arthur.

“The space-time wash,” said Ford, and as the  wind  blew  briefly past at that moment, he bared his teeth into it.

Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.

“Are we talking about,” he asked cautiously, “some sort of  Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?”

“Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.”

“Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he? Is he?” He pushed his hands into the pocket  of  his  dressing  gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.

“What?” said Ford.

“Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly?”

Ford looked angrily at him.

“Will you listen?” he snapped.

“I have been listening,” said Arthur,  “but  I'm  not  sure  it's helped.”

Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke  to him as slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from a telephone company accounts department.

“There seem ...” he said, “to be some pools  ...”  he  said,  “of instability ...” he said, “in the fabric ...” he said ...

Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing  gown  where Ford  was  holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a foolish remark.

“... in the fabric of space-time,” he said.

“Ah, that,” said Arthur.

“Yes, that,” confirmed Ford.

They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and  stared each other resolutely in the face.

“And it's done what?” said Arthur.

“It,” said Ford, “has developed pools of instability.”

“Has it?” said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment.

“It has,” said Ford with a similar degree of ocular immobility.

“Good,” said Arthur.

“See?” said Ford.

“No,” said Arthur.

There was a quiet pause.

“The difficulty with this conversation,” said Arthur after a sort of  pondering  look  had  crawled  slowly  across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky  outcrop,  “is  that  it's  very different  from  most  of  the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. They weren't  like  this.  Except  perhaps  some  of  the  ones  I've  had  with  elms which sometimes get a bit bogged down.”

“Arthur,” said Ford.

“Hello? Yes?” said Arthur.

“Just believe everything I tell you, and it  will  all  be  very, very simple.”

“Ah, well I'm not sure I believe that.”

They sat down and composed their thoughts.

Ford got out his  Sub-Etha  Sens-O-Matic.  It  was  making  vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.

“Flat battery?” said Arthur.

“No,” said Ford, “there is a moving disturbance in the fabric  of space-time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it's somewhere in our vicinity.”

“Where?”

Ford moved the device in  a  slow  lightly  bobbing  semi-circle.

Suddenly the light flashed.

“There!” said Ford, shooting out his  arm.  “There,  behind  that sofa!”

Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet  paisley-covered  Chesterfield  sofa  in  the  field  in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd  questions  sprang  into  his mind.

“Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”

“I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies  in  the space-time continuum!”

“And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur,  struggling  to  his feet  and,  he  hoped,  though  not  very  optimistically, to his senses.

“Arthur!” shouted Ford at him, “that sofa is there because of the space-time  instability  I've  been trying to get your terminally softened brain to get to grips with. It's been washed out of  the continuum,  it's space-time jetsam, it doesn't matter what it is, we've got to catch it, it's our only way out of here!”

He scrambled rapidly down the rocky outcrop and made  off  across the field.

“Catch it?” muttered Arthur, then frowned in bemusement as he saw that  the Chesterfield was lazily bobbing and wafting away across the grass.

With a whoop of utterly unexpected delight he leapt down the rock and  plunged  off  in  hectic  pursuit  of  Ford  Prefect and the irrational piece of furniture.

They  careered  wildly  through  the  grass,  leaping,  laughing, shouting  instructions  to  each other to head the thing off this way or that way. The sun shone dreamily  on  the  swaying  grass, tiny field animals scattered crazily in their wake.

Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day  was  for once  working  out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would  go  mad,  and  now  he  was  already chasing  a  Chesterfield  sofa  across  the fields of prehistoric Earth.

The sofa bobbed this way and that and seemed simultaneously to be as solid as the trees as it drifted past some of them and hazy as a billowing dream as it floated like a ghost through others.

Ford and Arthur pounded chaotically after it, but it  dodged  and weaved  as  if following its own complex mathematical topography, which it was. Still they pursued, still it danced and  span,  and suddenly   turned  and  dipped  as  if  crossing  the  lip  of  a catastrophe graph, and they were practically on top of it. With a heave and a shout they leapt on it, the sun winked out, they fell through a sickening nothingness, and emerged unexpectedly in  the middle  of  the  pitch  at Lord's Cricked Ground, St John's Wood, London, towards the end of the last Test Match of the  Australian Series  in  the year 198-, with England needing only twenty-eight runs to win.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 3

Important facts from Galactic history, number one:

(Reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner's Book  of  popular Galactic History.)

The night sky over the planet Krikkit is  the  least  interesting sight in the entire Universe.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 4

It was a charming and delightful day at Lord's as Ford and Arthur tumbled  haphazardly  out  of  a  space-time  anomaly and hit the immaculate turf rather hard.

The applause of the crowd was tremendous. It wasn't for them, but instinctively  they bowed anyway, which was fortunate because the small red heavy ball which the crowd actually had been applauding whistled  mere millimetres over Arthur's head. In the crowd a man collapsed.

They threw themselves back to the ground  which  seemed  to  spin hideously around them.

“What was that?” hissed Arthur.

“Something red,” hissed Ford back at him.

“Where are we?”

“Er, somewhere green.”

“Shapes,” muttered Arthur. “I need shapes.”

The applause of the crowd had been rapidly succeeded by gasps  of astonishment,  and  the awkward titters of hundreds of people who could not yet make up their minds about whether to  believe  what they had just seen or not.

“This your sofa?” said a voice.

“What was that?” whispered Ford.

Arthur looked up.

“Something blue,” he said.

“Shape?” said Ford.

Arthur looked again.

“It is shaped,”  he  hissed  at  Ford,  with  his  brow  savagely furrowing, “like a policeman.”

They remained crouched there for a few moments, frowning  deeply.  The  blue  thing  shaped like a policeman tapped them both on the shoulders.

“Come on, you two,” the shape said, “let's be having you.”

These words had an electrifying effect on Arthur. He leapt to his feet  like  an author hearing the phone ring and shot a series of startled glanced at the panorama around him  which  had  suddenly settled down into something of quite terrifying ordinariness.

“Where did you get this from?” he yelled at the policeman shape.

“What did you say?” said the startled shape.

“This is Lord's Cricket Ground, isn't it?” snapped Arthur. “Where did  you  find  it,  how did you get it here? I think,” he added, clasping his hand to his brow, “that I had better calm down.”  He squatted down abruptly in front of Ford.

“It is a policeman,” he said, “What do we do?”

Ford shrugged.

“What do you want to do?” he said.

“I want you,” said Arthur, “to tell me that I have been  dreaming for the last five years.”

Ford shrugged again, and obliged.

“You've been dreaming for the last five years,” he said.

Arthur got to his feet.

“It's all right, officer,” he said. “I've been dreaming  for  the last five years. Ask him,” he added, pointing at Ford, “he was in it.”

Having said this, he sauntered off towards the edge of the pitch, brushing  down  his  dressing  gown. He then noticed his dressing gown and stopped. He stared  at  it.  He  flung  himself  at  the policeman.

“So where did I get these clothes from?” he howled.

He collapsed and lay twitching on the grass.

Ford shook his head.

“He's had a bad two million years,” he said to the policeman, and together  they  heaved  Arthur on to the sofa and carried him off the  pitch  and  were  only  briefly  hampered  by   the   sudden disappearance of the sofa on the way.

Reaction to all this from the crowd were many and  various.  Most of them couldn't cope with watching it, and listened to it on the radio instead.

“Well, this is an interesting incident, Brian,”  said  one  radio commentator  to  another.  “I  don't  think  there  have been any mysterious materializations on the pitch since, oh since, well  I don't think there have been any - have there? - that I recall?”

“Edgbaston, 1932?”

“Ah, now what happened then ...”

“Well, Peter, I think it was Canter facing Willcox coming  up  to bowl from the pavilion end when a spectator suddenly ran straight across the pitch.”

There was a pause while the first commentator considered this.

“Ye ... e ... s ...” he said, “yes, there's nothing actually very mysterious  about that, is there? He didn't actually materialize, did he? Just ran on.”

“No, that's true,  but  he  did  claim  to  have  seen  something materialize on the pitch.”

“Ah, did he?”

“Yes. An alligator, I think, of some description.”

“Ah. And had anyone else noticed it?”

“Apparently not. And no one was  able  to  get  a  very  detailed description  from  him,  so  only the most perfunctory search was made.”

“And what happened to the man?”

“Well, I think someone offered to take him off and give him  some lunch,  but he explained that he'd already had a rather good one, so the matter was dropped and Warwickshire  went  on  to  win  by three wickets.”

“So, not very like this current instance. For those of you who've just  tuned  in,  you  may be interested to know that, er ... two men, two rather scruffily attired men, and  indeed  a  sofa  -  a Chesterfield I think?”

“Yes, a Chesterfield.”

“Have just materialized here in  the  middle  of  Lord's  Cricket Ground.  But I don't think they meant any harm, they've been very good-natured about it, and ...”

“Sorry, can I interrupt you a moment Peter and say that the  sofa has just vanished.”

“So it has. Well, that's one mystery less. Still, it's definitely one  for the record books I think, particularly occurring at this dramatic moment in play, England  now  needing  only  twenty-four runs  to  win  the  series.  The men are leaving the pitch in the company of a police officer, and I think everyone's settling down now and play is about to resume.”

“Now, sir,” said the policeman after  they  had  made  a  passage through the curious crowd and laid Arthur's peacefully inert body on a blanket, “perhaps you'd care to tell me who you  are,  where you come from, and what that little scene was all about?”

Ford looked at the ground for a moment as  if  steadying  himself for  something,  then  he straightened up and aimed a look at the policeman which hit him with the full force of every inch of  the six  hundred  light-years' distance between Earth and Ford's home near Betelgeuse.

“All right,” said Ford, very quietly, “I'll tell you.”

“Yes,  well,  that  won't  be  necessary,”  said  the   policeman hurriedly,  “just  don't  let whatever  it was happen again.” The policeman turned around and wandered off in search of anyone  who wasn't from Betelgeuse. Fortunately, the ground was full of them.

Arthur's consciousness  approached  his  body  as  from  a  great distance,  and  reluctantly.  It had had some bad times in there.  Slowly,  nervously,  it  entered  and  settled  down  in  to  its accustomed position.

Arthur sat up.

“Where am I?” he said.

“Lord's Cricket Ground,” said Ford.

“Fine,” said Arthur, and his consciousness stepped out again  for a quick breather. His body flopped back on the grass.

Ten minutes later, hunched over a cup of tea in  the  refreshment tent, the colour started to come back to his haggard face.

“How're you feeling?” said Ford.

“I'm home,” said Arthur hoarsely. He closed his eyes and greedily inhaled  the  steam  from  his tea as if it was - well, as far as Arthur was concerned, as if it was tea, which it was.

“I'm home,” he repeated, “home. It's  England,  it's  today,  the nightmare is over.” He opened his eyes again and smiled serenely.  “I'm where I belong,” he said in an emotional whisper.

“There are two things I fell which I should tell you,” said Ford, tossing a copy of the Guardian over the table at him.

“I'm home,” said Arthur.

“Yes,” said Ford. “One is,” he said pointing at the date  at  the top of the paper, “that the Earth will be demolished in two days' time.”

“I'm home,” said Arthur. “Tea,” he said, “cricket,” he added with pleasure,  “mown grass, wooden benches, white linen jackets, beer cans ...”

Slowly he began to focus on the newspaper. He cocked his head  on one side with a slight frown.

“I've seen that one before,” he said. His eyes wandered slowly up to the date, which Ford was idly tapping at. His face froze for a second or two and then began to do that  terribly  slow  crashing trick which Arctic ice-floes do so spectacularly in the spring.

“And the other thing,” said Ford, “is that you appear to  have  a bone in your beard.” He tossed back his tea.

Outside the refreshment tent, the sun  was  shining  on  a  happy crowd.  It  shone  on  white  hats and red faces. It shone on ice lollies and melted them. It shone on the tears of small  children whose  ice  lollies  had just melted and fallen off the stick. It shone on the trees, it flashed  off  whirling  cricket  bats,  it gleamed  off  the  utterly  extraordinary object which was parked behind the  sight-screens  and  which  nobody  appeared  to  have noticed.  It  beamed  on Ford and Arthur as they emerged blinking from the refreshment tent and surveyed the scene around them.

Arthur was shaking.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I should ...”

“No,” said Ford sharply.

“What?” said Arthur.

“Don't try and phone yourself up at home.”

“How did you know ...?”

Ford shrugged.

“But why not?” said Arthur.

“People who talk to themselves on the phone,” said  Ford,  “never learn anything to their advantage.”

“But ...”

“Look,” said Ford. He picked up an imaginary phone and dialled an imaginary dial.

“Hello?” he said into the imaginary mouthpiece. “Is  that  Arthur Dent?  Ah,  hello,  yes. This is Arthur Dent speaking. Don't hang up.”

He looked at the imaginary mouthpiece in disappointment.

“He hung up,” he said, shrugged,  and  put  the  imaginary  phone neatly back on its imaginary hook.

“This is not my first temporal anomaly,” he added.

A glummer look replaced the already glum look  on  Arthur  Dent's face.

“So we're not home and dry,” he said.

“We could not even be  said,”  replied  Ford,  “to  be  home  and vigorously towelling ourselves off.”

The game continued. The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot,  and  then  a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of  which  flew  a  ball.  The  batsman  swung  and thwacked  it  behind  him  over  the  sight-screens.  Ford's eyes followed the trajectory of the ball and  jogged  momentarily.  He stiffened.  He looked along the flight path of the ball again and his eyes twitched again.

“This isn't my towel,” said Arthur,  who  was  rummaging  in  his rabbit-skin bag.

“Shhh,” said Ford. He screwed his eyes up in concentration.

“I had a Golgafrinchan jogging towel,” continued Arthur, “it  was blue with yellow stars on it. This isn't it.”

“Shhh,” said Ford again. He covered one eye and looked  with  the other.

“This one's pink,” said Arthur, “it isn't yours is it?”

“I would like you to shut up about your towel,” said Ford.

“It isn't my towel,” insisted Arthur, “that is  the  point  I  am trying to ...”

“And the time at which I would like you to  shut  up  about  it,” continued Ford in a low growl, “is now.”

“All right,” said Arthur, starting to  stuff  it  back  into  the primitively  stitched  rabbit-skin  bag.  “I  realize  that it is probably not important in the cosmic scale of things,  it's  just odd,  that's  all.  A  pink towel suddenly, instead of a blue one with yellow stars.”

Ford was beginning to behave  rather  strangely,  or  rather  not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way which was strangely different from the other  strange  ways in  which  he more regularly behaved. What he was doing was this.  Regardless of the bemused stares it was provoking from his fellow members  of the crowd gathered round the pitch, he was waving his hands in sharp movements across his  face,  ducking  down  behind some  people,  leaping  up behind others, then standing still and blinking a lot. After a moment or two of this he started to stalk forward   slowly  and  stealthily  wearing  a  puzzled  frown  of concentration, like a leopard that's not sure whether  it's  just seen  a  half-empty tin of cat food half a mile away across a hot and dusty plain.

“This isn't my bag either,” said Arthur suddenly.

Ford's spell of concentration was broken. He  turned  angrily  on Arthur.

“I  wasn't  talking  about  my  towel,”   said   Arthur.   “We've established  that  that  isn't  mine. It's just that the bag into which I was putting the towel which is not mine is also not mine, though it is extraordinarily similar. Now personally I think that that is extremely odd, especially as  the  bag  was  one  I  made myself  on  prehistoric  Earth. These are also not my stones,” he added, pulling a few flat grey stones out  of  the  bag.  “I  was making  a  collection of interesting stones and these are clearly very dull ones.”

A roar of excitement thrilled through the crowd  and  obliterated whatever  it  was  that  Ford  said  in  reply  to  this piece of information. The cricket ball which  had  excited  this  reaction fell  out  of the sky and dropped neatly into Arthur's mysterious rabbit-skin bag.

“Now I would say that that was also a very curious  event,”  said Arthur,  rapidly  closing  the bag and pretending to look for the ball on the ground.

“I don't think  it's  here,”  he  said  to  the  small  boys  who immediately  clustered  round  him  to  join  in  the search, “it probably rolled off somewhere. Over there I expect.”  He  pointed vaguely  in the direction in which he wished they would push off.  One of the boys looked at him quizzically.

“You all right?” said the boy.

“No,” said Arthur.

“Then why you got a bone in your beard?” said the boy.

“I'm training it to like being wherever it's put.” Arthur  prided himself  on  saying this. It was, he thought, exactly the sort of thing which would entertain and stimulate young minds.

“Oh,” said the small boy,  putting  his  head  to  one  side  and thinking about it. “What's your name?”

“Dent,” said Arthur, “Arthur Dent.”

“You're a jerk, Dent,” said the boy, “a  complete  asshole.”  The boy  looked past him at something else, to show that he wasn't in any  particular  hurry  to  run  away,  and  then  wandered   off scratching  his  nose.  Suddenly Arthur remembered that the Earth was going to be demolished again in two days' time, and just this once didn't feel too bad about it.

Play resumed with a new ball, the sun continued to shine and Ford continued to jump up and down shaking his head and blinking.

“Something's on your mind, isn't it?” said Arthur.

“I think,” said Ford in a tone  of  voice  which  Arthur  by  now recognized    as    one    which   presaged   something   utterly unintelligible, “that there's an SEP over there.”

He pointed. Curiously enough, the direction he pointed in was not the  one  in  which  he  was  looking.  Arthur  looked in the one direction, which was towards the sight-screens, and in the  other which  was  at  the  field  of  play.  He nodded, he shrugged. He shrugged again.

“A what?” he said.

“An SEP.”

“An S ...?”

“... EP.”

“And what's that?”

“Somebody Else's Problem.”

“Ah, good,” said Arthur and relaxed. He had no idea what all that was about, but at least it seemed to be over. It wasn't.

“Over there,” said Ford, again pointing at the sight-screens  and looking at the pitch.

“Where?” said Arthur.

“There!” said Ford.

“I see,” said Arthur, who didn't.

“You do?” said Ford.

“What?” said Arthur.

“Can you see,” said Ford patiently, “the SEP?”

“I thought you said that was somebody else's problem.”

“That's right.”

Arthur nodded slowly,  carefully  and  with  an  air  of  immense stupidity.

“And I want to know,” said Ford, “if you can see it.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“What,” said Arthur, “does it look like?”

“Well, how should I know, you fool?” shouted Ford.  “If  you  can see it, you tell me.”

Arthur experienced that dull throbbing sensation just behind  the temples which was a hallmark of so many of his conversations with Ford. His brain lurked like a frightened  puppy  in  its  kennel.  Ford took him by the arm.

“An SEP,” he said, “is something that we can't see, or don't see, or  our  brain  doesn't  let  us  see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That's what SEP means.  Somebody  Else's Problem.  The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at  it  directly  you  won't  see  it  unless  you  know precisely  what  it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.”

“Ah,” said Arthur, “then that's why ...”

“Yes,” said Ford, who knew what Arthur was going to say.

“... you've been jumping up and ...”

“Yes.”

“... down, and blinking ...”

“Yes.”

“... and ...”

“I think you've got the message.”

“I can see it,” said Arthur, “it's a spaceship.”

For a moment Arthur was stunned by the reaction  this  revelation provoked. A roar erupted from the crowd, and from every direction people were running, shouting, yelling, tumbling over each  other in  a  tumult  of confusion. He stumbled back in astonishment and glanced fearfully around. Then he glanced around  again  in  even greater astonishment.

“Exciting, isn't it?” said an apparition. The apparition  wobbled in  front  of  Arthur's  eyes,  though the truth of the matter is probably that  Arthur's  eyes  were  wobbling  in  front  of  the apparition. His mouth wobbled as well.

“W ... w ... w ... w ...” his mouth said.

“I think your team have just won,” said the apparition.

“W ... w ... w ... w ...” repeated Arthur,  and  punctuated  each wobble  with  a  prod at Ford Prefect's back. Ford was staring at the tumult in trepidation.

“You are English, aren't you?” said the apparition.

“W ... w ... w ... w ... yes” said Arthur.

“Well, your team, as I say, have just won. The  match.  It  means they  retain the Ashes. You must be very pleased. I must say, I'm rather fond of cricket, though I  wouldn't  like  anyone  outside this planet to hear me saying that. Oh dear no.”

The apparition gave what looked  as  if  it  might  have  been  a mischievous  grin,  but  it  was hard to tell because the sun was directly behind him, creating a blinding halo round his head  and illuminating  his  silver  hair  and  beard  in  a  way which was awesome, dramatic and hard to reconcile with mischievous grins.

“Still,” he said, “it'll all be over in a couple of  days,  won't it?  Though  as  I said to you when we last met, I was very sorry about that. Still, whatever will have been, will have been.”

Arthur tried to speak, but  gave  up  the  unequal  struggle.  He prodded Ford again.

“I thought something terrible had happened,” said Ford, “but it's just  the  end  of  the  game.  We  ought  to get out. Oh, hello, Slartibartfast, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, pottering, pottering,” said the old man gravely.

“That your ship? Can you give us a lift anywhere?”

“Patience, patience,” the old man admonished.

“OK,” said Ford. “It's  just  that  this  planet's  going  to  be demolished pretty soon.”

“I know that,” said Slartibartfast.

“And, well, I just wanted to make that point,” said Ford.

“The point is taken.”

And if you feel that you really want to  hang  around  a  cricket pitch at this point ..."

“I do.”

“Then it's your ship.”

“It is.”

“I suppose.” Ford turned away sharply at this point.

“Hello, Slartibartfast,” said Arthur at last.

“Hello, Earthman,” said Slartibartfast.

“After all,” said Ford, “we can only die once.”

The old man ignored this and stared keenly on to the pitch,  with eyes  that  seemed  alive  with  expressions that had no apparent bearing on what was happening out there. What was  happening  was that  the crowd was gathering itself into a wide circle round the centre of the pitch. What Slartibartfast  saw  in  it,  he  alone knew.

Ford was humming something. It was  just  one  note  repeated  at intervals.  He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. If anybody had asked him he  would  have said  he  was humming the first line of a Noel Coward song called “Mad About the Boy” over and over again. It would then have  been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for  reasons  which  he  hoped  would  be apparent, he was omitting the “about the boy” bit. He was annoyed that nobody asked.

“It's just,” he burst out at last, “that if we don't go soon,  we might  get  caught  in  the  middle  of it all again. And there's nothing that  depresses  me  more  than  seeing  a  planet  being destroyed.  Except  possibly  still  being on it when it happens.  Or,” he added in an undertone, “hanging around cricket matches.”

“Patience,” said Slartibartfast again. “Great things are afoot.”

“That's what you said last time we met,” said Arthur.

“They were,” said Slartibartfast.

“Yes, that's true,” admitted Arthur.

All, however, that seemed to be afoot  was  a  ceremony  of  some kind.  It was being specially staged for the benefit of tv rather than the spectators, and all they  could  gather  about  it  from where they were standing was what they heard from a nearby radio.  Ford was aggressively uninterested.

He fretted as he heard it explained that the Ashes were about  to be  presented to the Captain of the English team out there on the pitch, fumed when told that this was because  they  had  now  won them  for  the  nth time, positively barked with annoyance at the information that the Ashes were the remains of a  cricket  stump, and  when, further to this, he was asked to contend with the fact that the cricket stump in question had been burnt  in  Melbourne, Australia, in 1882, to signify the “death of English cricket”, he rounded on Slartibartfast, took a deep breath, but didn't have  a chance  to  say anything because the old man wasn't there. He was marching out on to the pitch with terrible purpose in  his  gait, his  hair, beard and robes swept behind him, looking very much as Moses would have looked if Sinai had been a well-cut lawn instead of, as it is more usually represented, a fiery smoking mountain.

“He said to meet him at his ship,” said Arthur.

“What in the name of zarking fardwarks is the  old  fool  doing?” exploded Ford.

“Meeting us at his ship in two minutes,” said Arthur with a shrug which  indicated  total  abdication  of thought. They started off towards it. Strange sounds reached their ears. They tried not  to listen,  but  could  not  help  noticing  that Slartibartfast was querulously demanding that he be given the silver urn  containing the  Ashes,  as  they  were,  he said, “vitally important for the past, present and future safety of the Galaxy”, and that this was causing wild hilarity. They resolved to ignore it.

What happened next they could not ignore. With  a  noise  like  a hundred  thousand  people  saying “wop”, a steely white spaceship suddenly seemed to create  itself  out  of  nothing  in  the  air directly  above  the  cricket  pitch and hung there with infinite menace and a slight hum.

Then for a while it did nothing, as if it expected  everybody  to go  about  their  normal  business  and  not mind it just hanging there.

Then it did something quite extraordinary. Or rather,  it  opened up  and  let something quite extraordinary come out of it, eleven quite extraordinary things.

They were robots, white robots.

What was most extraordinary about them was that they appeared  to have come dressed for the occasion. Not only were they white, but they carried what appeared to be cricket bats, and not only that, but  they also carried what appeared to be cricket balls, and not only that but they wore white ribbing pads round the lower  parts of  their  legs.  These  last  were  extraordinary  because  they appeared to contain jets which allowed these curiously  civilized robots  to  fly  down  from their hovering spaceship and start to kill people, which is what they did

“Hello,” said Arthur, “something seems to be happening.”

“Get to the ship,” shouted Ford. “I don't want to know,  I  don't want to see, I don't want to hear,” he yelled as he ran, “this is not my planet, I didn't choose to be here, I don't  want  to  get involved,  just  get  me out of here, and get me to a party, with people I can relate to!”

Smoke and flame billowed from the pitch.

“Well, the supernatural brigade certainly  seems  to  be  out  in force here today ...” burbled a radio happily to itself.

“What I need,” shouted Ford, by way of  clarifying  his  previous remarks,  “is  a  strong drink and a peer-group.” He continued to run, pausing only for a moment to grab Arthur's arm and drag  him along  with him. Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let it all wash over him.

“They're playing cricket,” muttered Arthur, stumbling along after Ford.  “I  swear they are playing cricket. I do not know why they are doing this, but that is what they are doing. They're not just killing  people,  they're  sending  them  up,” he shouted, “Ford, they're sending us up!”

It would have been hard to  disbelieve  this  without  knowing  a great  deal  more Galactic history than Arthur had so far managed to pick up in his travels. The ghostly but  violent  shapes  that could  be seen moving within the thick pall of smoke seemed to be performing a series of bizarre parodies of batting  strokes,  the difference  being  that  every  ball  they struck with their bats exploded wherever it landed. The very  first  one  of  these  had dispelled  Arthur's  initial reaction, that the whole thing might just be a publicity stunt by Australian margarine manufacturers.

And then, as suddenly as it had all started,  it  was  over.  The eleven  white  robots  ascended  through  the seething cloud in a tight formation, and with a few last flashes of flame entered the bowels  of  their hovering white ship, which, with the noise of a hundred thousand people saying “foop”, promptly vanished into the thin air out of which it had wopped.

For a moment there was a terrible stunned silence, and  then  out of  the  drifting smoke emerged the pale figure of Slartibartfast looking even more like Moses because in spite  of  the  continued absence  of  the  mountain  he was at least now striding across a fiery and smoking well-mown lawn.

He stared wildly about him until he saw the hurrying  figures  of Arthur  Dent  and  Ford  Prefect  forcing  their  way through the frightened crowd which was for the moment busy stampeding in  the opposite  direction.  The  crowd  was  clearly thinking to itself about what an unusual day this was turning out  to  be,  and  not really knowing which way, if any, to turn.

Slartibartfast was gesturing urgently  at  Ford  and  Arthur  and shouting at them, as the three of them gradually converged on his ship, still parked behind the sight-screens and still  apparently unnoticed  by  the  crowd  stampeding  past it who presumably had enough of their own problems to cope with at that time.

“They've garble warble farble!”  shouted  Slartibartfast  in  his thin tremulous voice.

“What did he say?” panted Ford as he elbowed his way onwards.

Arthur shook his head.

“`They've ...' something or other,” he said.

“They've table warble farble!” shouted Slartibartfast again.

Ford and Arthur shook their heads at each other.

“It sounds urgent,” said Arthur. He stopped and shouted.

“What?”

“They've  garble  warble  fashes!”  cried  Slartibartfast,  still waving at them.

“He says,” said Arthur, “that they've taken the  Ashes.  That  is what I think he says.” They ran on.

“The ...?” said Ford.

“Ashes,” said Arthur tersely. “The burnt  remains  of  a  cricket stump.  It's  a  trophy.  That  ...”  he  was  panting,  “is  ...  apparently ... what they ... have come and taken.” He  shook  his head very slightly as if he was trying to get his brain to settle down lower in his skull.

“Strange thing to want to tell us,” snapped Ford.

“Strange thing to take.”

“Strange ship.”

They had arrived at it. The second strangest thing about the ship was  watching  the  Somebody  Else's  Problem field at work. They could now clearly see the ship for what  it  was  simply  because they  knew  it  was  there.  It was quite apparent, however, that nobody else could. This wasn't because it was actually  invisible or  anything  hyper-impossible like that. The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex  that  nine hundred  and  ninety-nine  thousand  million,  nine  hundred  and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand,  nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.  The  ultra-famous  sciento-magician  Effrafax of Wug once bet his life that, given a year, he could render the  great  megamountain Magramal entirely invisible.

Having spent most of the year jiggling around with  immense  Lux-O-Valves and Refracto-Nullifiers and Spectrum-Bypass-O-Matics, he realized, with nine hours to go, that he wasn't going to make it.

So, he and  his  friends,  and  his  friends'  friends,  and  his friends'  friends'  friends,  and  his friends' friends' friends' friends, and some rather less good friends of theirs who happened to  own  a  major  stellar  trucking  company, put in what now is widely recognized as being the hardest night's work  in  history, and,  sure  enough,  on the following day, Magramal was no longer visible. Effrafax lost his bet - and therefore his life -  simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed (a) that when walking around the area that Magramal ought to be he didn't  trip over  or break his nose on anything, and (b) a suspicious-looking extra moon.

The Somebody Else's  Problem  field  is  much  simpler  and  more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because  it  relies  on  people's natural  disposition  not  to  see  anything  they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted  the mountain  pink  and  erected  a  cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then  people  would  have  walked  past  the mountain,  round  it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.

And this is precisely what was  happening  with  Slartibartfast's ship.  It  wasn't  pink, but if it had been, that would have been the least of its visual problems and people were simply  ignoring it like anything.

The most extraordinary thing about it was  that  it  looked  only partly  like  a  spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a  small  upended Italian bistro.

Ford and Arthur  gazed  up  at  it  with  wonderment  and  deeply offended sensibilities.

“Yes, I know,” said Slartibartfast, hurrying up to them  at  that point,  breathless and agitated, “but there is a reason. Come, we must go. The ancient nightmare is come again. Doom  confronts  us all. We must leave at once.”

“I fancy somewhere sunny,” said Ford.

Ford and Arthur followed Slartibartfast into the ship and were so perplexed  by  what  they  saw  inside  it that they were totally unaware of what happened next outside.

A spaceship, yet another one, but  this  one  sleek  and  silver, descended  from  the  sky on to the pitch, quietly, without fuss, its long legs unlocking in a smooth ballet of technology.

It landed gently. It extended a short  ramp.  A  tall  grey-green figure  marched  briskly  out  and  approached  the small knot of people who were gathered in the centre of the  pitch  tending  to the  casualties  of  the recent bizarre massacre. It moved people aside with quiet, understated authority, and came at  last  to  a man  lying  in  a desperate pool of blood, clearly now beyond the reach of any Earthly medicine, breathing, coughing his last.  The figure knelt down quietly beside him.

“Arthur Philip Deodat?” asked the figure.

The man, with horrified confusion in eyes, nodded feebly.

“You're a no-good dumbo  nothing,”  whispered  the  creature.  “I thought you should know that before you went.”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 5

Important facts from Galactic history, number two:

(Reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner's Book  of  popular Galactic History.)

Since this  Galaxy  began,  vast  civilizations  have  risen  and

fallen,  risen  and  fallen,  risen and fallen so often that it's

quite tempting to think that life in the Galaxy must be

(a) something akin to seasick - space-sick,  time  sick,  history sick or some such thing, and

(b) stupid.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 6

It seemed to Arthur as if the whole sky suddenly just stood aside and let them through.

It seemed to him that the atoms of his brain and the atoms of the cosmos were streaming through each other.

It seemed to him that he was blown on the wind of  the  Universe, and that the wind was him.

It seemed to him that he was one of the thoughts of the  Universe and that the Universe was a thought of his.

It seemed to the people at Lord's  Cricket  Ground  that  another North  London  restaurant had just come and gone as they so often do, and that this was Somebody Else's Problem.

“What happened?” whispered Arthur in considerable awe.

“We took off,” said Slartibartfast.

Arthur lay in startled stillness on the  acceleration  couch.  He wasn't   certain  whether  he  had  just  got  space-sickness  or religion.

“Nice mover,” said Ford in an unsuccessful  attempt  to  disguise the   degree   to   which   he   had   been   impressed  by  what Slartibartfast's ship had just done, “shame about the decor.”

For a moment or two the old man didn't reply. He was  staring  at the  instruments  with  the  air  of one who is trying to convert fahrenheit to centigrade in his head whilst his house is  burning down.  Then  his  brow  cleared and he stared for a moment at the wide  panoramic  screen  in  front  of  him,  which  displayed  a bewildering  complexity  of  stars  streaming like silver threads around them.

His lips moved as if he was trying to spell  something.  Suddenly his  eyes  darted  in alarm back to his instruments, but then his expression merely subsided into a steady frown. He looked back up at  the  screen.  He felt his own pulse. His frown deepened for a moment, then he relaxed.

“It's a mistake to try  and  understand  mathematics,”  he  said, “they only worry me. What did you say?”

“Decor,” said Ford. “Pity about it.”

“Deep in the  fundamental  heart  of  mind  and  Universe,”  said Slartibartfast, “there is a reason.”

Ford glanced sharply around. He clearly thought this  was  taking an optimistic view of things.

The interior of the flight deck was dark green,  dark  red,  dark brown,  cramped and moodily lit. Inexplicably, the resemblance to a small Italian bistro had failed to end at the  hatchway.  Small pools  of light picked out pot plants, glazed tiles and all sorts of little unidentifiable brass things.

Rafia-wrapped bottles lurked hideously in the shadows.

The instruments which  had  occupied  Slartibartfast's  attention seemed  to  be mounted in the bottom of bottles which were set in concrete.

Ford reached out and touched it.

Fake concrete. Plastic. Fake bottles set in fake concrete.

The fundamental heart of mind and Universe  can  take  a  running jump,  he thought to himself, this is rubbish. On the other hand, it could not be denied that the way the ship had moved  made  the Heart of Gold seem like an electric pram.

He swung himself off the  couch.  He  brushed  himself  down.  He looked at Arthur who was singing quietly to himself. He looked at the screen and recognized nothing. He looked at Slartibartfast.

“How far did we just travel?” he said.

“About ...” said Slartibartfast, “about two  thirds  of  the  way across  the Galactic disc, I would say, roughly. Yes, roughly two thirds, I think.”

“It's a strange thing,” said Arthur quietly,  “that  the  further and  faster  one  travels  across  the  Universe,  the more one's position in it seems to be largely immaterial, and one is  filled with a profound, or rather emptied of a ...”

“Yes, very strange,” said Ford. “Where are we going?”

“We are going,” said  Slartibartfast,  “to  confront  an  ancient nightmare of the Universe.”

“And where are you going to drop us off?”

“I will need your help.”

“Tough. Look, there's somewhere you can take us where we can have fun, I'm trying to think of it, we can get drunk and maybe listen to some extremely evil music. Hold on, I'll look it up.”  He  dug out  his copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and tipped through those parts of the index primarily concerned with sex and drugs and rock and roll.

“A curse has arisen from the mists of time,” said Slartibartfast.

“Yes,  I  expect  so,”  said  Ford.  “Hey,”  he  said,   lighting accidentally  on  one  particular  reference  entry,  “Eccentrica Gallumbits, did you ever meet her? The triple-breasted  whore  of Eroticon Six. Some people say her erogenous zones start some four miles from her actual body. Me, I disagree, I say five.”

“A curse,” said Slartibartfast, “which will engulf the Galaxy  in fire  and  destruction,  and  possibly  bring  the  Universe to a premature doom. I mean it,” he added.

“Sounds like a bad time,” said Ford, “with  look  I'll  be  drunk enough  not to notice. Here,” he said, stabbing his finger at the screen of the Guide, “would be a really wicked place to go, and I think  we  should. What do you say, Arthur? Stop mumbling mantras and pay attention. There's important stuff you're missing here.”

Arthur pushed himself up from his couch and shook his head.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“To confront an ancient night-”

“Can it,” said Ford. “Arthur, we are going out into the Galaxy to have some fun. Is that an idea you can cope with?”

“What's Slartibartfast looking so anxious about?” said Arthur.

“Nothing,” said Ford.

“Doom,”  said  Slartibartfast.  “Come,”  he  added,  with  sudden authority, “there is much I must show and tell you.”

He walked towards  a  green  wrought-iron  spiral  staircase  set incomprehensibly  in the middle of the flight deck and started to ascend. Arthur, with a frown, followed.

Ford slung the Guide sullenly back into his satchel.

“My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland  and  a natural  deficiency in moral fibre,” he muttered to himself, “and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.”

Nevertheless, he stomped up the stairs behind them.

What they found upstairs was just stupid, or so  it  seemed,  and Ford  shook  his  head,  buried his face in his hands and slumped against a pot plant, crushing it against the wall.

“The   central   computational   area,”    said    Slartibartfast unperturbed,  “this is where every calculation affecting the ship in any way is performed. Yes I know what it looks like, but it is in  fact a complex four-dimensional topographical map of a series of highly complex mathematical functions.”

“It looks like a joke,” said Arthur.

“I know what it looks like,” said Slartibartfast, and  went  into it.  As  he  did  so,  Arthur had a sudden vague flash of what it might mean, but he refused to believe it. The Universe could  not possibly  work  like  that, he thought, cannot possibly. That, he thought to himself, would be as absurd as ... he terminated  that line of thinking. Most of the really absurd things he could think of had already happened.

And this was one of them.

It was a large glass cage, or box - in fact a room.

In it was a table, a long one. Around it were  gathered  about  a

dozen  chairs,  of the bentwood style. On it was a tablecloth - a

grubby,  red  and  white  check  tablecloth,  scarred  with   the

occasional   cigarette  burn,  each,  presumably,  at  a  precise

calculated mathematical position.

And on the tablecloth sat some half-eaten Italian  meals,  hedged about with half-eaten breadsticks and half-drunk glasses of wine, and toyed with listlessly by robots.

It was  all  completely  artificial.  The  robot  customers  were attended  by  a  robot  waiter,  a  robot wine waiter and a robot maetre  d'.  The  furniture  was   artificial,   the   tablecloth artificial, and each particular piece of food was clearly capable of exhibiting all the mechanical characteristics of, say, a pollo sorpreso, without actually being one.

And all participated in a  little  dance  together  -  a  complex routine  involving the manipulation of menus, bill pads, wallets, cheque books, credit cards, watches, pencils and  paper  napkins, which  seemed  to be hovering constantly on the edge of violence, but never actually getting anywhere.

Slartibartfast hurried in, and then appeared to pass the time  of day  quite  idly  with  the maetre d', whilst one of the customer robots, an autorory, slid slowly under the table, mentioning what he intended to do to some guy over some girl.

Slartibartfast took over the seat which had been thus vacated and passed a shrewd eye over the menu. The tempo of the routine round the table seemed  somehow  imperceptibly  to  quicken.  Arguments broke  out,  people  attempted  to  prove things on napkins. They waved fiercely at each  other,  and  attempted  to  examine  each other's pieces of chicken. The waiter's hand began to move on the bill pad more quickly than a human hand could  manage,  and  then more quickly than a human eye could follow. The pace accelerated.  Soon, an extraordinary and insistent politeness  overwhelmed  the group, and seconds later it seemed that a moment of consensus was suddenly achieved. A new vibration thrilled through the ship.

Slartibartfast emerged from the glass room.

“Bistromathics,” he said. “The most powerful computational  force known   to   parascience.  Come  to  the  Room  of  Informational Illusions.”

He swept past and carried them bewildered in his wake.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 7

The Bistromatic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing  vast interstellar  distances  without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors.

Bistromathics  itself  is  simply  a  revolutionary  new  way  of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute  but  depended  on  the  observer's movement  in  space,  and  that  space  was  not an absolute, but depended on the  observer's  movement  in  time,  so  it  is  now realized  that  numbers  are  not  absolute,  but  depend  on the observer's movement in restaurants.

The first non-absolute number is the number of  people  for  whom the  table  is  reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then  bear  no apparent  relation  to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them  after  the show/match/party/gig,  or  to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.

The second non-absolute number is  the  given  time  of  arrival, which   is  now  known  to  be  one  of  those  most  bizarre  of mathematical concepts,  a  recipriversexcluson,  a  number  whose existence  can  only  be  defined  as  being  anything other than itself. In other words, the given time  of  arrival  is  the  one moment  of  time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part  in many  branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic  equations  used  to  engineer  the  Somebody Else's Problem field.

The third and most mysterious piece of  non-absoluteness  of  all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people  at  the  table,  and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a sub-phenomenon in  this field.)

The baffling discrepancies which used  to  occur  at  this  point remained  uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously. They were at the time put down to such things  as politeness,    rudeness,    meanness,    flashness,    tiredness, emotionality,  or  the  lateness  of  the  hour,  and  completely forgotten  about on the following morning. They were never tested under  laboratory  conditions,  of  course,  because  they  never occurred  in  laboratories  -  not  in  reputable laboratories at least.

And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers  that  the startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:

Numbers written  on  restaurant  bills  within  the  confines  of restaurants  do  not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other  parts  of  the Universe.

This  single  fact  took  the  scientific  world  by  storm.   It completely  revolutionized  it.  So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the  finest  minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years.

Slowly, however,  the  implications  of  the  idea  began  to  be understood.  To  begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much what the man in the street would have said, “Oh yes, I could have  told  you that,” about. Then some phrases like “Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks” were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it.

The small groups of monks who had taken  up  hanging  around  the major  research  institutes  singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination  were eventually given a street theatre grant and went away.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 8

“In space travel, you see,” said Slartibartfast,  as  he  fiddled with some instruments in the Room of Informational Illusions, “in space travel ...”

He stopped and looked about him.

The Room of Informational Illusions was a  welcome  relief  after the visual monstrosities of the central computational area. There was nothing in it. No information, no illusions, just themselves, white  walls  and a few small instruments which looked as if they were meant to plug into something which  Slartibartfast  couldn't find.

“Yes?” urged Arthur. He had picked up Slartibartfast's  sense  of urgency but didn't know what to do with it.

“Yes what?” said the old man.

“You were saying?”

Slartibartfast looked at him sharply.

“The numbers,” he said, “are awful.” He resumed his search.

Arthur nodded wisely to himself. After a while he  realized  that this  wasn't  getting  him anywhere and decided that he would say “what?” after all.

“In space travel,” repeated Slartibartfast, “all the numbers  are awful.”

Arthur nodded again and looked round to Ford for help,  but  Ford was practising being sullen and getting quite good at it.

“I was only,” said Slartibartfast with a sigh,  “trying  to  save you the trouble of asking me why all the ship's computations were being done on a waiter's bill pad.”

Arthur frowned.

“Why,” he said, "were all the ship's computations being done on a

wait-"

He stopped.

Slartibartfast said, “Because in space travel all the numbers are awful.”

He could tell that he wasn't getting his point across.

“Listen,” he said. “On a waiter's bill  pad  numbers  dance.  You must have encountered the phenomenon.”

“Well ...”

“On a waiter's  bill  pad,”  said  Slartibartfast,  “reality  and unreality  collide  on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible, within certain parameters.”

“What parameters?”

“It's impossible to say,” said  Slartibartfast.  “That's  one  of them.  Strange  but  true.  At  least,  I think it's strange,” he added, “and I'm assured that it's true.”

At that moment he located the slot in the wall for which  he  had been  searching,  and  clicked the instrument he was holding into it.

“Do not be alarmed,” he said, and then suddenly darted an alarmed look at himself, and lunged back, “it's ...”

They didn't hear what he said, because at that  moment  the  ship winked  out  of  existence  around them and a starbattle-ship the size of a small Midlands  industrial  city  plunged  out  of  the sundered night towards them, star lasers ablaze.

They gaped, pop-eyed, and were unable to scream.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 9

Another world, another day, another dawn.

The early morning's thinnest sliver of light appeared silently.

Several billion trillion  tons  of  superhot  exploding  hydrogen nuclei  rose  slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there  is  the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.

The moment passed as it regularly  did  on  Squornshellous  Zeta, without incident.

The mist clung to the surface of the  marshes.  The  swamp  trees were  grey with it, the tall reeds indistinct. It hung motionless like held breath.

Nothing moved.

There was silence.

The sun struggled feebly with the mist, tried to impart a  little warmth  here,  shed  a  little light there, but clearly today was going to be just another long haul across the sky.

Nothing moved.

Again, silence.

Nothing moved.

Silence.

Very often on Squornshellous Zeta, whole days would  go  on  like this, and this was indeed going to be one of them.

Fourteen hours later the sun sank hopelessly beneath the opposite horizon with a sense of totally wasted effort.

And a few hours later it reappeared, squared  its  shoulders  and started on up the sky again.

This time, however, something was happening. A mattress had  just met a robot.

“Hello, robot,” said the mattress.

“Bleah,” said the robot and continued what it  was  doing,  which was walking round very slowly in a very tiny circle.

“Happy?” said the mattress.

The robot stopped and looked at the mattress.  It  looked  at  it quizzically.  It  was  clearly  a very stupid mattress. It looked back at him with wide eyes.

After what it had calculated to ten significant decimal places as being the precise length of pause most likely to convey a general contempt for all things mattressy, the robot  continued  to  walk round in tight circles.

“We could have a conversation,” said  the  mattress,  “would  you like that?”

It was a large mattress, and probably one of quite high  quality.  Very  few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance,  the  one  in which  we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not,  grow  somewhere.  A  forest  was discovered  recently  in  which  most  of  the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit.  The life  cycle  of  ratchet  screwdriver fruit  it  quite  interesting.  Once picked it needs a dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one  night it  suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin which crumbles into dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with  flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a sort of hole for a screw. This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what  it  is  supposed to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it.

No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from  their lives  either.  They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures which live quiet private lives in the marshes  of  Squornshellous Zeta.  Many  of  them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seem to mind and all of  them  are called Zem.

“No,” said Marvin.

“My name,” said the mattress,  “is  Zem.  We  could  discuss  the weather a little.”

Marvin paused again in his weary circular plod.

“The dew,” he observed, “has clearly fallen with  a  particularly sickening thud this morning.”

He resumed his  walk,  as  if  inspired  by  this  conversational outburst  to  fresh  heights of gloom and despondency. He plodded tenaciously. If he had had teeth he would have  gritted  them  at this point. He hadn't. He didn't. The mere plod said it all.

The mattress flolloped around. This is a  thing  that  only  live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in more common usage. It flolloped in a sympathetic  sort of way, moving  a  fairish  body  of  water  as  it did so. It blew a few bubbles up through the  water  engagingly.  Its  blue  and  white stripes  glistened briefly in a sudden feeble ray of sun that had unexpectedly made it through the mist, causing  the  creature  to bask momentarily.

Marvin plodded.

“You have something on your mind, I  think,”  said  the  mattress floopily.

“More  than  you  can  possibly  imagine,”  dreaded  Marvin.  “My capacity  for mental activity of all kinds is as boundless as the infinite reaches  of  space  itself.  Except  of  course  for  my capacity for happiness.”

Stomp, stomp, he went.

“My capacity for happiness,” he added,  “you  could  fit  into  a matchbox without taking out the matches first.”

The mattress globbered. This is the noise made by a live,  swamp-dwelling  mattress  that  is  deeply moved by a story of personal tragedy. The word  can  also,  according  to  The  Ultra-Complete Maximegalon  Dictionary  of  Every  Language Ever, mean the noise made by the Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop on discovering that he has  forgotten  his  wife's birthday for the second year running.  Since there was only ever one Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop, and he  never  married,  the  word is only ever used in a negative or speculative sense,  and  there  is  an  ever-increasing  body  of opinion   which   holds   that   The  Ultra-Complete  Maximegalon Dictionary is not worth the fleet of lorries it takes to cart its microstored  edition  around in. Strangely enough, the dictionary omits the word “floopily”, which simply means “in the  manner  of something which is floopy”.

The mattress globbered again.

“I sense a deep dejection in your diodes,” it  vollued  (for  the meaning  of  the  word  “vollue”,  buy  a  copy of Squornshellous Swamptalk at any remaindered bookshop, or alternatively  buy  The Ultra-Complete  Maximegalon Dictionary, as the University will be very glad to get it off their  hands  and  regain  some  valuable parking   lots),   “and   it  saddens  me.  You  should  be  more mattresslike. We live quiet retired lives in the swamp, where  we are  content  to  flollop  and vollue and regard the wetness in a fairly floopy manner. Some of us are killed, but all  of  us  are called Zem, so we never know which and globbering is thus kept to a minimum. Why are you walking in circles?”

“Because my leg is stuck,” said Marvin simply.

“It seems to me,” said the mattress  eyeing  it  compassionately, “that it is a pretty poor sort of leg.”

“You are right,” said Marvin, “it is.”

“Voon,” said the mattress.

“I expect so,” said Marvin, “and I also expect that you find  the idea of a robot with an artificial leg pretty amusing. You should tell your friends Zem and Zem when you see  them  later;  they'll laugh,  if  I know them, which I don't of course - except insofar as I know all organic life forms, which is  much  better  than  I would wish to. Ha, but my life is but a box of wormgears.”

He stomped around again in his tiny circle, around his thin steel peg-leg which revolved in the mud but seemed otherwise stuck.

“But why do you just keep walking  round  and  round?”  said  the mattress.

“Just to make the point,” said Marvin, and continued,  round  and round.

“Consider it  made,  my  dear  friend,”  flurbled  the  mattress, “consider it made.”

“Just another million years,” said Marvin,  “just  another  quick million. Then I might try it backwards. Just for the variety, you understand.”

The mattress could feel deep in his innermost spring pockets that the robot dearly wished to be asked how long he had been trudging in this futile and  fruitless  manner,  and  with  another  quiet flurble he did so.

“Oh, just over the one-point-five-million mark, just over,”  said Marvin airily. “Ask me if I ever get bored, go on, ask me.”

The mattress did.

Marvin  ignored  the  question,  he  merely  trudged  with  added emphasis.

“I  gave  a  speech  once,”  he  said  suddenly,  and  apparently unconnectedly. “You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.”

“Er, five,” said the mattress.

“Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?”

The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it  was in  the  presence  of a not unremarkable mind. It willomied along its entire length, sending excited  little  ripples  through  its shallow algae-covered pool.

It gupped.

“Tell me,” it urged, “of the speech you once made, I long to hear it.”

“It was received very badly,” said  Marvin,  “for  a  variety  of reasons.  I  delivered  it,” he added, pausing to make an awkward humping sort of gesture with his not-exactly-good  arm,  but  his arm which was better than the other one which was dishearteningly welded to his left side, “over there, about a mile distance.”

He was pointing as well as he  could  manage,  and  he  obviously wanted to make it totally clear that this was as well as he could manage, through the mist, over the reeds, to a part of the  marsh which looked exactly the same as every other part of the marsh.

“There,” he repeated. “I was  somewhat  of  a  celebrity  at  the time.”

Excitement gripped the mattress. It had never heard  of  speeches being  delivered  on  Squornshellous  Zeta,  and certainly not by celebrities. Water spattered off it as a thrill  glurried  across its back.

It did something which  mattresses  very  rarely  bother  to  do.  Summoning  every  bit of its strength, it reared its oblong body, heaved it up into the air and held it quivering there for  a  few seconds  whilst  it peered through the mist over the reeds at the part of the marsh which Marvin had indicated, observing,  without disappointment,  that it was exactly the same as every other part of the marsh. The effort was too much, and it flodged  back  into its pool, deluging Marvin with smelly mud, moss and weeds.

“I was a celebrity,” droned the robot sadly, “for a  short  while on  account  of my miraculous and bitterly resented escape from a fate almost as good as death in the heart of a blazing  sun.  You can  guess  from  my  condition,” he added, “how narrow my escape was. I was rescued by a scrap-metal merchant, imagine that.  Here I am, brain the size of ... never mind.”

He trudged savagely for a few seconds.

“He it was who fixed me up with this leg. Hateful, isn't  it?  He sold  me to a Mind Zoo. I was the star exhibit. I had to sit on a box and tell my story whilst people told me to cheer up and think positive. `Give us a grin, little robot,' they would shout at me, `give us a little chuckle.' I would explain to them that  to  get my  face  to  grin wold take a good couple of hours in a workshop with a wrench, and that went down very well.”

“The speech,” urged the mattress. “I long to hear of  the  speech you gave in the marshes.”

“There was a bridge built across the marshes.  A  cyberstructured hyperbridge,  hundreds  of  miles in length, to carry ion-buggies and freighters over the swamp.”

“A bridge?” quirruled the mattress. “Here in the swamp?”

“A bridge,” confirmed Marvin, “here in the swamp. It was going to revitalize  the  economy of the Squornshellous System. They spent the entire economy of the Squornshellous System building it. They asked me to open it. Poor fools.”

It began to rain a little, a fine spray slid through the mist.

“I stood on the platform. For hundreds of miles in front  of  me, and hundreds of miles behind me, the bridge stretched.”

“Did it glitter?” enthused the mattress.

“It glittered.”

“Did it span the miles majestically?”

“It spanned the miles majestically.”

“Did it stretch like a silver thread far out into  the  invisible mist?”

“Yes,” said Marvin. “Do you want to hear this story?”

“I want to hear your speech,” said the mattress.

“This is what I said. I said, `I would like to say that it  is  a very  great  pleasure,  honour  and privilege for me to open this bridge, but I can't because my lying  circuits  are  all  out  of commission.  I  hate  and  despise  you  all.  I now declare this hapless cyberstructure open to the unthinkable abuse of  all  who wantonly  cross  her.'  And  I  plugged  myself  into the opening circuits.”

Marvin paused, remembering the moment.

The mattress flurred  and  glurried.  It  flolloped,  gupped  and willomied, doing this last in a particularly floopy way.

“Voon,” it wurfed at last. “And it was a magnificent occasion?”

“Reasonably magnificent.  The  entire  thousand-mile-long  bridge spontaneously  folded  up  its  glittering spans and sank weeping into the mire, taking everybody with it.”

There was  a  sad  and  terrible  pause  at  this  point  in  the conversation  during  which  a  hundred  thousand  people  seemed unexpectedly to say “wop” and a team of  white  robots  descended from  the  sky like dandelion seeds drifting on the wind in tight military formation. For a sudden violent  moment  they  were  all there,  in  the swamp, wrenching Marvin's false leg off, and then they were gone again in their ship, which said “foop”.

“You see the sort of thing I have to contend with?”  said  Marvin to the gobbering mattress.

Suddenly, a moment later, the robots were back again for  another violent  incident, and this time when they left, the mattress was alone in the swamp.  He  flolloped  around  in  astonishment  and alarm.  He  almost lurgled in fear. He reared himself to see over the reeds, but there was nothing to  see,  just  more  reeds.  He listened,  but  there  was  no  sound  on the wind beyond the now familiar sound of half-crazed etymologists calling  distantly  to each other across the sullen mire.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 10

The body of Arthur Dent span.

The Universe shattered into a million glittering fragments around it,  and  each  particular  shard span silently through the void, reflecting on its silver surface some single searing holocaust of fire and destruction.

And then the blackness behind the  Universe  exploded,  and  each particular piece of blackness was the furious smoke of hell.

And the nothingness behind  the  blackness  behind  the  Universe erupted,  and  behind the nothingness behind the blackness behind the shattered Universe was at last the dark figure of an  immense man speaking immense words.

“These, then,”  said  the  figure,  speaking  from  an  immensely

comfortable   chair,   "were   the  Krikkit  Wars,  the  greatest

devastation  ever  visited  upon  our  Galaxy.  What   you   have

experienced ..."

Slartibartfast floated past, waving.

“It's just a documentary,” he called out. “This  is  not  a  good bit. Terribly sorry, trying to find the rewind control ...”

“... is what billions of billions of innocent ...”

“Do not,” called out  Slartibartfast  floating  past  again,  and fiddling furiously with the thing that he had stuck into the wall of the Room of Informational Illusions  and  which  was  in  fact still stuck there, “agree to buy anything at this point.”

“... people, creatures, your fellow beings ...”

Music swelled - again, it was immense music, immense chords.  And behind the man, slowly, three tall pillars began to emerge out of the immensely swirling mist.

“... experienced, lived through - or, more often, failed to  live through.  Think  of that, my friends. And let us not forget - and in just a moment I shall be able to suggest a way which will help us  always to remember - that before the Krikkit Wars, the Galaxy was that rare and wonderful thing a happy Galaxy!”

The music was going bananas with immensity at this point.

“A Happy Galaxy, my friends, as represented by the symbol of  the Wikkit Gate!”

The three pillars stood out clearly  now,  three  pillars  topped with two cross pieces in a way which looked stupefyingly familiar to Arthur's addled brain.

“The three pillars,” thundered the man. “The Steel  Pillar  which represented the Strength and Power of the Galaxy!”

Searchlights seared out and danced crazy dances up and  down  the pillar on the left which was, clearly, made of steel or something very like it. The music thumped and bellowed.

“The Perspex Pillar,” announced the man, “representing the forces of Science and Reason in the Galaxy!”

Other searchlights played exotically up and down  the  righthand, transparent  pillar  creating  dazzling  patterns within it and a sudden inexplicable craving  for  ice-cream  in  the  stomach  of Arthur Dent.

“And,”  the  thunderous  voice  continued,  “the  Wooden  Pillar, representing  ...”  and  here his voice became just very slightly hoarse with wonderful  sentiments,  “the  forces  of  Nature  and Spirituality.”

The lights picked out the central pillar. The music moved bravely up into the realms of complete unspeakability.

“Between them supporting,” the voice rolled on,  approaching  its climax,  “the  Golden  Bail  of Prosperity and the Silver Bail of Peace!”

The whole structure was now flooded with dazzling lights, and the music  had  now,  fortunately,  gone far beyond the limits of the discernible. At the top of the three pillars the two  brilliantly gleaming  bails sat and dazzled. There seemed to be girls sitting on top of them, or maybe they were meant to be angels. Angels are usually represented as wearing more than that, though.

Suddenly there was a dramatic hush in what was  presumably  meant to be the Cosmos, and a darkening of the lights.

“There is not a world,” thrilled the man's expert voice,  “not  a civilized  world  in  the Galaxy where this symbol is not revered even today. Even  in  primitive  worlds  it  persists  in  racial memories.  This  it was that the forces of Krikkit destroyed, and this it is that now locks  their  world  away  till  the  end  of eternity!”

And with a flourish, the man produced in his hands a model of the Wikkit  gate.  Scale  was  terribly  hard  to judge in this whole extraordinary spectacle, but the model looked as if it must  have been about three feet high.

“Not the original key, of course. That, as  everyone  knows,  was destroyed,  blasted  into  the ever-whirling eddies of the space-time continuum and lost for ever. This is a  remarkable  replica, hand-tooled   by  skilled  craftsmen,  lovingly  assembled  using ancient craft secrets into a memento you will be proud to own, in memory  of  those  who  fell,  and in tribute to the Galaxy - our Galaxy - which they died to defend ...”

Slartibartfast floated past again at this moment.

“Found it,” he said. “We can lose all this  rubbish.  Just  don't nod, that's all.”

“Now, let us bow our heads in payment,” intoned  the  voice,  and then said it again, much faster and backwards.

Lights came and went, the pillars  disappeared,  the  man  gabled himself backwards into nothing, the Universe snappily reassembled itself around them.

“You get the gist?” said Slartibartfast.

“I'm astonished,” said Arthur, “and bewildered.”

“I was asleep,” said Ford, who floated into view at  this  point.

“Did I miss anything?”

They found themselves once again teetering rather rapidly on  the edge  of  an  agonizingly  high  cliff. The wind whipped out from their faces and across a bay on which the remains of one  of  the greatest  and most powerful space battle-fleets ever assembled in the Galaxy was briskly burning itself back  into  existence.  The sky  was  a sullen pink, darkening via a rather curious colour to blue and upwards to black. Smoke billowed down out of  it  at  an incredible lick.

Events were now passing back by them almost  too  quickly  to  be distinguished,  and when, a short while later, a huge starbattle-ship rushed away from them as if they'd  said  “boo”,  they  only just recognized it as the point at which they had come in.

But now things were too rapid, a video-tactile blur which brushed and  jiggled them through centuries of galactic history, turning, twisting, flickering. The sound was a mere thin thrill.

Periodically through the thickening jumble of events they  sensed appalling  catastrophes,  deep  horrors,  cataclysmic shocks, and these were always associated with certain recurring  images,  the only  images  which  ever  stood out clearly from the avalance of tumbling history: a wicket gate, a  small  hard  red  ball,  hard white  robots,  and  also something less distinct, something dark and cloudy.

But there was also another sensation which rose  clearly  out  of the thrilling passage of time.

Just as a slow series of clicks when speeded  up  will  lose  the definition  of  each  individual  click and gradually take on the quality of a sustained and rising tone, so a series of individual impressions here took on the quality of a sustained emotion - and yet not an emotion. If it  was  an  emotion,  it  was  a  totally emotionless  one.  It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not as a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was  deadly - again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.

And just as a rising tone will change in character  and  take  on harmonics  as it rises, so again, this emotionless emotion seemed to rise to an unbearable if unheard scream and suddenly seemed to be a scream of guilt and failure.

And suddenly it stopped.

They were left standing on a quiet hilltop on a tranquil evening.

The sun was setting.

All around them softly undulating green  countryside  rolled  off gently  into  the distance. Birds sang about what they thought of it all, and the general opinion seemed to be good. A  little  way away  could  be heard the sound of children playing, and a little further away than the apparent source of that sound could be seen in the dimming evening light the outlines of a small town.

The town appeared to consist mostly of fairly low buildings  made of white stone. The skyline was of gentle pleasing curves.

The sun had nearly set.

As if out of nowhere, music began.  Slartibartfast  tugged  at  a switch and it stopped.

A voice said, “This ...” Slartibartfast tugged at a switch and it stopped.

“I will tell you about it,” he said quietly.

The place was peaceful.  Arthur  felt  happy.  Even  Ford  seemed cheerful.  They  walked a short way in the direction of the town, and the Informational Illusion of  the  grass  was  pleasant  and springy  under  their feet, and the Informational Illusion of the flowers smelt sweet  and  fragrant.  Only  Slartibartfast  seemed apprehensive and out of sorts.

He stopped and looked up.

It suddenly occurred to Arthur that, coming as this  did  at  the end,  so to speak, or rather the beginning of all the horror they had just blurredly experienced, something nasty must be about  to happen.  He  was  distressed  to think that something nasty could happen to somewhere as idyllic as this. He too glanced up.  There was nothing in the sky.

“They're not about  to  attack  here,  are  they?”  he  said.  He realized that this was merely a recording he was walking through, but he still felt alarmed.

“Nothing is about to attack here,” said Slartibartfast in a voice which  unexpectedly  trembled with emotion. “This is where it all started. This is the place itself. This is Krikkit.”

He stared up into the sky.

The sky, from one horizon to another, from  east  to  west,  from north to south, was utterly and completely black.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 11

Stomp stomp.

Whirrr.

“Pleased to be of service.”

“Shut up.”

“Thank you.”

Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp.

Whirrr.

“Thank you for making a simple door very happy.”

“Hope your diodes rot.”

“Thank you. Have a nice day.”

Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

Whirrr.

“It is my pleasure to open for you ...”

“Zark off.”

“... and my satisfaction to close again with the knowledge  of  a job well done.”

“I said zark off.”

“Thank you for listening to this message.”

Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

“Wop.”

Zaphod stopped stomping. He had been stomping around the Heart of Gold  for  days, and so far no door had said “wop” to him. He was fairly certain that no door had said “wop” to him now. It was not the  sort  of  thing  doors said. Too concise. Furthermore, there were not enough doors. It sounded as if a hundred thousand people had  said “wop”, which puzzled him because he was the only person on the ship.

It was dark. Most of the ship's non-essential systems were closed down. It was drifting in a remote area of the Galaxy, deep in the inky blackness of space. So  which  particular  hundred  thousand people  would  turn up at this point and say a totally unexpected “wop”?

He looked about him, up the corridor and down  the  corridor.  It was  all  in  deep  shadow.  There were just the very dim pinkish outlines of the  doors  which  glowed  in  the  dark  and  pulsed whenever they spoke, though he had tried every way he could think of of stopping them.

The lights were off so that his heads could avoid looking at each other,  because  neither  of  them  was  currently a particularly engaging sight, and nor had they been since he had made the error of looking into his soul.

It had indeed been an error. It had been  late  one  night  -  of course.

It had been a difficult day - of course.

There had been soulful music playing on the ship's sound system - of course.

And he had, of course, been slightly drunk.

In other words, all the usual conditions which bring on a bout of soul-searching  had  applied,  but  it had, nevertheless, clearly been an error.

Standing now, silent and alone in the dark corridor he remembered the  moment  and  shivered.  His  one head looked one way and his other the other and each decided that the other was  the  way  to go.

He listened but could hear nothing.

All there had been was the “wop”.

It seemed an awfully long way to bring an awfully large number of people just to say one word.

He started nervously to edge his way  in  the  direction  of  the bridge.  There  at  least  he  would  feel in control. He stopped again. The way he was feeling he didn't think he was  an  awfully good person to be in control.

The  first  shock  of  that  moment,  thinking  back,  had   been discovering that he actually had a soul.

In fact he'd always more or less assumed that he had  one  as  he had  a  full  complement  of  everything  else, and indeed two of somethings, but suddenly actually to encounter the thing  lurking there deep within him had giving him a severe jolt.

And then to discover (this was the second shock) that  it  wasn't the  totally wonderful object which he felt a man in his position had a natural right to expect had jolted him again.

Then he had thought about what his position actually was and  the renewed  shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious  happened  to  it.  He  then  had another  quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right.

“Freedom,” he said aloud.

Trillian came on to the bridge at that  point  and  said  several enthusiastic things on the subject of freedom.

“I can't cope with it,” he said darkly, and sent  a  third  drink down  to  see why the second hadn't yet reported on the condition of the first. He looked uncertainly at both of her and  preferred the one on the right.

He poured a drink down his other throat with  the  plan  that  it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second to pull  itself  together.  Then  all  three  would  go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to and maybe a bit of a sing as well.

He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink  had  understood all  that, so he sent down a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support.

“You're drinking too much,” said Trillian.

His heads collided trying to sort out the four of  her  he  could now  see  into  a  whole  position.  He gave up and looked at the navigation screen and was astonished to see  a  quite  phenomenal number of stars.

“Excitement and adventure and really wild things,” he muttered.

“Look,” she said in a sympathetic tone of  voice,  and  sat  down near  him, “it's quite understandable that you're going to feel a little aimless for a bit.”

He boggled at her. He had never seen anyone sit on their own  lap before.

“Wow,” he said. He had another drink.

“You've finished the mission you've been on for years.”

“I haven't been on it. I've tried to avoid being on it.”

“You've still finished it.”

He grunted. There seemed to be a terrific party going on  in  his stomach.

“I think it finished me,” he said. “Here I am, Zaphod Beeblebrox, I  can  go anywhere, do anything. I have the greatest ship in the know sky, a girl with whom things seem to be working  out  pretty well ...”

“Are they?”

"As far as I can tell I'm not an expert in personal relationships

..."

Trillian raised her eyebrows.

“I am,” he added, “one hell of a guy, I can do  anything  I  want only I just don't have the faintest idea what.”

He paused.

“One thing,” he further added, “has suddenly ceased  to  lead  to another”  -  in  contradiction  of which he had another drink and slid gracelessly off his chair.

Whilst he slept it off, Trillian did a  little  research  in  the ship's copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness.

“Go to it,” it said, “and good luck.”

It was cross-referenced to the entry concerning the size  of  the Universe and ways of coping with that.

Then she found the entry on Han Wavel, an exotic holiday  planet, and one of the wonders of the Galaxy.

Han Wavel is a world which consists largely  of  fabulous  ultra-luxury  hotels  and casinos, all of which have been formed by the natural erosion of wind and rain.

The chances of this happening are more or less  one  to  infinity against.  Little  is known of how this came about because none of the geophysicists, probability statisticians,  meteoranalysts  or bizzarrologists who are so keen to research it can afford to stay there.

Terrific, thought Trillian to herself, and within a few hours the great white running-shoe ship was slowly powering down out of the sky beneath a hot brilliant sun towards a brightly coloured sandy spaceport.  The  ship  was  clearly  causing  a  sensation on the ground, and Trillian  was  enjoying  herself.  She  heard  Zaphod moving around and whistling somewhere in the ship.

“How are you?” she said over the general intercom.

“Fine,” he said brightly, “terribly well.”

“Where are you?”

“In the bathroom.”

“What are you doing?”

“Staying here.”

After an hour or two it became plain that he  meant  it  and  the ship returned to the sky without having once opened its hatchway.

“Heigh ho,” said Eddie the Computer.

Trillian nodded patiently, tapped her fingers a couple  of  times and pushed the intercom switch.

“I think that enforced fun is probably not what you need at  this point.”

“Probably not,” replied Zaphod from wherever he was.

“I think a bit of physical challenge would help draw you  out  of yourself.”

“Whatever you think, I think,” said Zaphod.

“Recreational  Impossibilities”  was  a  heading   which   caught Trillian's  eye  when,  a short while later, she sat down to flip through the Guide again, and as  the  Heart  of  Gold  rushed  at improbable speeds in an indeterminate direction, she sipped a cup of something undrinkable from the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser  and read about how to fly.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has  this  to  say  on  the subject of flying.

There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying.

The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself  at  the  ground and miss.

Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy.

All it requires is simply the ability to throw  yourself  forward with  all  your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.

Most people fail to miss the  ground,  and  if  they  are  really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it's the second point, the missing, which  presents  the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to  miss  the  ground  accidentally.  It's  no  good  deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something  else  when  you're  halfway  there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about  how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

It is notoriously difficult to prise  your  attention  away  from these  three  things  during  the  split  second you have at your disposal.  Hence  most  people's  failure,  and  their   eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.

If,  however,  you  are  lucky  enough  to  have  your  attention momentarily  distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species  of  beetle  crawling along  a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches  above  it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.

This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration.

Bob and float, float and bob.

Ignore all considerations of  your  own  weight  and  simply  let yourself waft higher.

Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this  point  because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.

They are most likely to say something along the lines  of,  “Good God, you can't possibly be flying!”

It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.

Waft higher and higher.

Try a few swoops, gentle ones at  first,  then  drift  above  the treetops breathing regularly.

Do not wave at anybody.

When you have done this a few times you will find the  moment  of distraction rapidly becomes easier and easier to achieve.

You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight,  your  speed, your manoeuvrability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do,  but just allowing it to happen as if it was going to anyway.

You will also learn how to land properly, which is something  you will  almost  certainly cock up, and cock up badly, on your first attempt.

There are private flying  clubs  you  can  join  which  help  you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and  exhibit  and/or  explain  them  at  the crucial moments. Few genuine hitch-hikers will be able to afford to join these  clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.

Trillian read this longingly, but reluctantly decided that Zaphod wasn't  really  in the right frame of mind for attempting to fly, or for walking  through  mountains  or  for  trying  to  get  the Brantisvogan  Civil  Service  to  acknowledge a change-of-address card, which were  the  other  things  listed  under  the  heading “Recreational Impossibilities”.

Instead, she flew the ship to Allosimanius  Syneca,  a  world  of ice,  snow, mind-hurtling beauty and stunning cold. The trek from the snow plains of  Liska  to  the  summit  of  the  Ice  Crystal Pyramids  of  Sastantua is long and gruelling, even with jet skis and a team of Syneca Snowhounds, but the view  from  the  top,  a view which takes in the Stin Glacier Fields, the shimmering Prism Mountains and the far ethereal dancing icelights,  is  one  which first  freezes  the  mind and then slowly releases it to hitherto unexperienced horizons of beauty, and  Trillian,  for  one,  felt that  she  could do with a bit of having her mind slowly released to hitherto unexperienced horizons of beauty.

They went into a low orbit.

There lay the silverwhite beauty of Allosimanius  Syneca  beneath them.

Zaphod stayed in bed with one head stuck under a pillow  and  the other doing crosswords till late into the night.

Trillian nodded patiently again, counted to a  sufficiently  high number, and told herself that the important thing now was just to get Zaphod talking.

She prepared, by dint  of  deactivating  all  the  robot  kitchen synthomatics,  the  most  fabulously  delicious  meal  she  could contrive -  delicately  oiled  meals,  scented  fruits,  fragrant cheeses, fine Aldebaran wines.

She carried it through to him and asked if he felt  like  talking things through.

“Zark off,” said Zaphod.

Trillian nodded patiently to herself, counted to an  even  higher number,  tossed  the  tray lightly aside, walked to the transport room and just teleported herself the hell out of his life.

She  didn't  even  programme  any  coordinates,  she  hadn't  the faintest  idea  where she was going, she just went - a random row of dots flowing through the Universe.

“Anything,” she said to herself as  she  left,  “is  better  than this.”

“Good job too,” muttered  Zaphod  to  himself,  turned  over  and failed to go to sleep.

The next day he restlessly paced the empty corridors of the ship, pretending  not to look for her, though he knew she wasn't there.  He ignored the computer's querulous demands to know just what the hell  was  going on around here by fitting a small electronic gag across a pair of its terminals.

After a while he began to turn down the lights. There was nothing to see. Nothing was about to happen.

Lying in bed one night - and night was now  virtually  continuous on  the ship - he decided to pull himself together, to get things into some kind of perspective. He sat up sharply and  started  to pull  clothes  on.  He  decided that there must be someone in the Universe feeling  more  wretched,  miserable  and  forsaken  than himself, and he determined to set out and find him.

Halfway to the bridge it occurred to him that it might be Marvin, and he returned to bed.

It was a few hours later than this, as he stomped  disconsolately about  the darkened corridors swearing at cheerful doors, that he heard the “wop” said, and it made him very nervous.

He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying  to  unbend  a  corkscrew  by  telekinesis.  He  laid  his fingertips against the wall and felt an  unusual  vibration.  And now  he  could  quite  clearly hear slight noises, and could hear where they were coming from - they were coming from the bridge.

“Computer?” he hissed.

“Mmmm?” said the computer terminal nearest him, equally quietly.

“Is there someone on this ship?”

“Mmmmm,” said the computer.

“Who is it?”

Mmmmm mmm mmmmm," said the computer.

“What?”

“Mmmmm mmmm mm mmmmmmmm.”

Zaphod buried one of his faces in two of his hands.

“Oh, Zarquon,” he muttered to himself.  Then  he  stared  up  the corridor  towards  the entrance to the bridge in the dim distance from which more and purposeful noises were coming, and  in  which the gagged terminals were situated.

“Computer,” he hissed again.

“Mmmmm?”

“When I ungag you ...”

“Mmmmm.”

“Remind me to punch myself in the mouth.”

“Mmmmm mmm?”

“Either one. Now just tell me this. One for yes, two for  no.  Is it dangerous?”

“Mmmmm.”

“It is?”

“Mmmm.”

“You didn't just go `mmmm' twice?”

“Mmmm mmmm.”

“Hmmmm.”

He inched his way up the  corridor  as  if  he  would  rather  be yarding his way down it, which was true.

He was within two yards  of  the  door  to  the  bridge  when  he suddenly  realized  to his horror that it was going to be nice to him, and he stopped dead. He hadn't been able  to  turn  off  the doors' courtesy voice circuits.

This doorway to the bridge was  concealed  from  view  within  it because of the excitingly chunky way in which the bridge had been designed to  curve  round,  and  he  had  been  hoping  to  enter unobserved.

He leant despondently back against the wall again and  said  some words which his other head was quite shocked to hear.

He peered at the dim pink outline of  the  door,  and  discovered that in the darkness of the corridor he could just about make out the Sensor Field which extended out into the  corridor  and  told the  door  when there was someone there for whom it must open and to whom it must make a cheery and pleasant remark.

He pressed himself hard back against the wall and  edged  himself towards  the  door,  flattening  his chest as much as he possibly could to avoid brushing against the very, very dim  perimeter  of the  field.  He  held  his  breath,  and congratulated himself on having lain in bed sulking for the  last  few  days  rather  than trying  to work out his feelings on chest expanders in the ship's gym.

He then realized he was going to have to speak at this point.

He took a series of  very  shallow  breaths,  and  then  said  as quickly  and  as  quietly as he could, “Door, if you can hear me, say so very, very quietly.”

Very, very quietly, the door murmured, “I can hear you.”

“Good. Now, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to open.  When  you open I do not want you to say that you enjoyed it, OK?”

“OK.”

“And I don't want you to say to me that I have made a simple door very  happy,  or that it is your pleasure to open for me and your satisfaction to close again with the  knowledge  of  a  job  well done, OK?”

“OK.”

“And I do not want you to ask me to have a nice day, understand?”

“I understand.”

“OK,” said Zaphod, tensing himself, “open now.”

The door slid open quietly. Zaphod slipped quietly  through.  The door closed quietly behind him.

“Is that the way you like it, Mr Beeblebrox?” said the  door  out loud.

“I want you to imagine,” said Zaphod to the group of white robots who  swung  round  to stare at him at that point, “that I have an extremely powerful Kill-O-Zap blaster pistol in my hand.”

There was an  immensely  cold  and  savage  silence.  The  robots regarded  him  with  hideously  dead eyes. They stood very still.  There was something intensely  macabre  about  their  appearance, especially  to Zaphod who had never seen one before or even known anything about them. The Krikkit Wars  belonged  to  the  ancient past  of  the  Galaxy,  and  Zaphod  had  spent most of his early history lessons plotting how he was going to have  sex  with  the girl  in  the  cybercubicle  next  to him, and since his teaching computer had been an integral part of this plot it had eventually had  all its history circuits wiped and replaced with an entirely different set of ideas  which  had  then  resulted  in  it  being scrapped  and sent to a home for Degenerate Cybermats, whither it was followed by the girl who had inadvertently fallen  deeply  in love  with  the  unfortunate  machine,  with  the result (a) that Zaphod never got near her and (b) that he missed out on a  period of  ancient  history that would have been of inestimable value to him at this moment.

He stared at them in shock.

It was impossible to explain why,  but  their  smooth  and  sleek white bodies seemed to be the utter embodiment of clean, clinical evil. From their hideously dead eyes to their  powerful  lifeless feet,  they  were  clearly  the calculated product of a mind that wanted simply to kill. Zaphod gulped in cold fear.

They had been dismantling part of the rear bridge wall,  and  had forced  a  passage through some of the vital innards of the ship.  Through the tangled wreckage Zaphod could see, with a further and worse  sense of shock, that they were tunnelling towards the very heart of the ship, the heart of the Improbability Drive that  had been  so  mysteriously created out of thin air, the Heart of Gold itself.

The robot closest to him was regarding him in such a  way  as  to suggest  that  it  was  measuring  every smallest particle of his body, mind and capability. And when it spoke, what it said seemed to  bear this impression out. Before going on to what it actually said, it is worth recording at this point  that  Zaphod  was  the first  living  organic being to hear one of these creatures speak for something over  ten  billion  years.  If  he  had  paid  more attention  to his ancient history lessons and less to his organic being, he might have been more impressed by this honour.

The robot's voice was like its body, cold, sleek and lifeless. It had  almost  a  cultured  rasp to it. It sounded as ancient as it was.

It said, “You do have a Kill-O-Zap blaster pistol in your hand.”

Zaphod didn't know what it  meant  for  a  moment,  but  then  he glanced down at his own hand and was relieved to see that what he had found clipped to a  wall  bracket  was  indeed  what  he  had thought it was.

“Yeah,” he said in a kind  of  relieved  sneer,  which  is  quite tricky,  “well,  I  wouldn't  want  to  overtax your imagination, robot.” For a while nobody said  anything,  and  Zaphod  realized that the robots were obviously not here to make conversation, and that it was up to him.

“I can't help noticing that you have parked your ship,”  he  said with  a  nod  of  one  of his heads in the appropriate direction, “through mine.”

There was no denying this. Without regard for any kind of  proper dimensional  behaviour  they  had  simply materialized their ship precisely where they wanted it to be, which  meant  that  it  was simply  locked  through the Heart of Gold as if they were nothing more than two combs.

Again, they made no response to this, and Zaphod wondered if  the conversation  would gather any momentum if he phrased his part of it in the form of questions.

“... haven't you?” he added.

“Yes,” replied the robot."

“Er, OK,” said Zaphod. “So what are you cats doing here?”

Silence.

“Robots,” said Zaphod, “what are you robots doing here?”

“We have come,” rasped the robot, “for the Gold of the Bail.”

Zaphod nodded. He waggled his gun to invite further  elaboration.

The robot seemed to understand this.

“The Gold Bail is part of the Key we seek,” continued the  robot, “to release our Masters from Krikkit.”

Zaphod nodded again. He waggled his gun again.

“The Key,” continued the robot simply, “was disintegrated in time and space. The Golden Bail is embedded in the device which drives your ship. It will be reconstituted in the Key. Our Masters shall be released. The Universal Readjustment will continue.”

Zaphod nodded again.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

A slightly pained expression seemed to cross the robot's  totally expressionless  face.  He  seemed  to be finding the conversation depressing.

“Obliteration,” it said. “We seek  the  Key,”  it  repeated,  “we already  have the Wooden Pillar, the Steel Pillar and the Perspex Pillar. In a moment we will have the Gold Bail ...”

“No you won't.”

“We will,” stated the robot.

“No you won't. It makes my ship work.”

“In a moment,” repeated the robot patiently, “we  will  have  the Gold Bail ...”

“You will not,” said Zaphod.

“And then we must go,” said the robot, in all seriousness, “to  a party.”

“Oh,” said Zaphod, startled. “Can I come?”

“No,” said the robot. “We are going to shoot you.”

“Oh yeah?” said Zaphod, waggling his gun.

“Yes,” said the robot, and they shot him.

Zaphod was so surprised that they had to shoot him  again  before he fell down.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 12

“Shhh,” said Slartibartfast. “Listen and watch.”

Night had now fallen on ancient Krikkit. The  sky  was  dark  and empty. The only light was coming from the nearby town, from which pleasant convivial sounds were drifting quietly  on  the  breeze.  They  stood  beneath  a  tree  from which heady fragrances wafted around them. Arthur squatted and felt the Informational  Illusion of  the  soil  and  the grass. He ran it through his fingers. The soil seemed heavy and rich, the grass  strong.  It  was  hard  to avoid  the impression that this was a thoroughly delightful place in all respects.

The sky was, however, extremely blank and  seemed  to  Arthur  to cast  a  certain  chill  over the otherwise idyllic, if currently invisible, landscape. Still, he supposed, it's a question of what you're used to.

He felt  a tap on his shoulder and looked up. Slartibartfast  was quietly  directing his attention to something down the other side of the hill. He looked and  could  just  see  some  faint  lights dancing and waving, and moving slowly in their direction.

As they came nearer, sounds became audible too, and soon the  dim lights  and  noises  resolved  themselves  into  a small group of people who were walking home across the hill towards the town.

They walked quite near the watchers beneath  the  tree,  swinging lanterns  which  made soft and crazy lights dance among the trees and grass, chattering contentedly, and actually  singing  a  song about  how terribly nice everything was, how happy they were, how much they enjoyed working on the farm, and how pleasant it was to be  going  home  to  see their wives and children, with a lilting chorus to the effect that the flowers were smelling  particularly nice at this time of year and that it was a pity the dog had died seeing as it liked them so much. Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney  sitting  with  his  feet  up  by  the fire on evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to buy with the  proceeds, and thinking probably Essex.

“The Masters of Krikkit,” breathed Slartibartfast  in  sepulchral tones.

Coming, as it did, so hard upon the heels  of  his  own  thoughts about  Essex this remark caused Arthur a moment's confusion. Then the logic of the situation imposed itself on his scattered  mind, and  he  discovered  that he still didn't understand what the old man meant.

“What?” he said.

“The Masters of Krikkit,” said Slartibartfast again, and  if  his breathing  had  been sepulchral before, this time he sounded like someone in Hades with bronchitis.

Arthur peered at the group and tried to make sense of what little information he had at his disposal at this point.

The people in the group were clearly alien, if only because  they seemed  a  little tall, thin, angular and almost as pale as to be white, but otherwise they appeared remarkably pleasant; a  little whimsical  perhaps, one wouldn't necessarily want to spend a long coach journey with them, but the point was that if they  deviated in any way from being good straightforward people it was in being perhaps too nice rather than not nice enough.  So  why  all  this rasping  lungwork  from  Slartibartfast  which  would  seem  more appropriate to a radio commercial for one of  those  nasty  films about chainsaw operators taking their work home with them?

Then, this Krikkit angle was a tough one, too.  He  hadn't  quite

fathomed the connection between what he knew as cricket, and what

...

Slartibartfast interrupted his train of thought at this point  as if sensing what was going through his mind.

“The game you know as cricket,” he  said,  and  his  voice  still seemed  to  be  wandering lost in subterranean passages, "is just one of those curious freaks  of  racial  memory  which  can  keep images  alive in the mind aeons after their true significance has been lost in the mists of time. Of all the races on  the  Galaxy, only  the  English  could  possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform  it  into what I'm afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.

“Rather fond of it myself,” he added, “but in most people's  eyes you  have  been  inadvertently  guilty  of the most grotesque bad taste. Particularly the bit about the little red ball hitting the wicket, that's very nasty.”

“Um,” said Arthur with a reflective frown to  indicate  that  his cognitive  synapses  were coping with this as best as they could, “um.”

“And  these,”  said  Slartibartfast,  slipping  back  into  crypt guttural  and  indicating  the  group  of Krikkit men who had now walked past them, “are the ones who started it all, and  it  will start tonight. Come, we will follow, and see why.”

They slipped out from  underneath  the  tree,  and  followed  the cheery party along the dark hill path. Their natural instinct was to tread quietly and  stealthily  in  pursuit  of  their  quarry, though,   as   they   were  simply  walking  through  a  recorded Informational Illusion, they could as easily  have  been  wearing euphoniums  and  woad  for all the notice their quarry would have taken of them.

Arthur noticed that a couple of members of  the  party  were  now singing  a  different  song. It came lilting back to them through the soft night air, and was a sweet romantic ballad  which  would have netted McCartney Kent and Sussex and enabled him to put in a fair offer for Hampshire.

“You must surely know,” said Slartibartfast to Ford, “what it  is that is about to happen?”

“Me?” said Ford. “No.”

“Did you not learn Ancient  Galactic  History  when  you  were  a child?”

“I was in the cybercubicle behind Zaphod,”  said  Ford,  “it  was very  distracting.  Which  isn't  to say that I didn't learn some pretty stunning things.”

At this point Arthur noticed a curious feature to the  song  that the party were singing. The middle eight bridge, which would have had  McCartney  firmly  consolidated  in  Winchester  and  gazing intently  over  the  Test  Valley to the rich pickings of the New Forest beyond,  had  some  curious  lyrics.  The  songwriter  was referring to meeting with a girl not “under the moon” or “beneath the stars” but “above the grass”, which struck  Arthur  a  little prosaic.  Then  he  looked up again at the bewildering black sky, and had the distinct feeling that there was  an  important  point here,  if  only he could grasp what it was. It gave him a feeling of being alone in the Universe, and he said so.

“No,” said Slartibartfast, with a slight quickening of his  step, "the  people  of Krikkit have never thought to themselves `We are alone in the Universe.' They are surrounded by a huge Dust Cloud, you  see,  their  single  sun with its single world, and they are right out on the utmost eastern edge of the  Galaxy.  Because  of the  Dust  Cloud there has never been anything to see in the sky.  At night it is totally blank, During the day there  is  the  sun, but  you  can't  look  directly  at  that so they don't. They are hardly aware of the sky. It's as if they had a blind  spot  which extended 180 degrees from horizon to horizon.

“You see, the reason why they have never thought `We are alone in the  Universe'  is  that  until tonight they don't know about the Universe. Until tonight.”

He moved on, leaving the words ringing in the air behind him.

“Imagine,” he said, “never even thinking `We  are  alone'  simply because  it  has  never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be.”

He moved on again.

“I'm afraid this is going to be a little unnerving,” he added.

As he spoke, they became aware of a very thin roaring scream high up  in  the  sightless  sky  above  them. They glanced upwards in alarm, but for a moment or two could see nothing.

Then Arthur noticed that the people in the party in front of them had heard the noise, but that none of them seemed to know what to so  with  it.   They   were   glancing   around   themselves   in consternation,  left,  right,  forwards,  backwards,  even at the ground. It never occurred to them to look upwards.

The profoundness of the shock and  horror  they  emanated  a  few moments  later  when  the  burning  wreckage  of a spaceship came hurtling and screaming out of the sky and crashed  about  half  a mile  from where they were standing was something that you had to be there to experience.

Some speak of the Heart of Gold in  hushed  tones,  some  of  the Starship Bistromath.

Many speak of the legendary  and  gigantic  Starship  Titanic,  a majestic  and  luxurious  cruise-liner  launched  from  the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol some hundreds  of years ago now, and with good reason.

It was  sensationally  beautiful,  staggeringly  huge,  and  more pleasantly  equipped than any ship in what now remains of history (see note below on the Campaign for Real Time)  but  it  had  the misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics,  long  before  this  difficult  and  cussed  branch   of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood.

The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a  prototype  Improbability  Field  into  it,  which  was  meant, supposedly, to ensure that  it  was  Infinitely  Improbable  that anything would ever go wrong with any part of the ship.

They did not realize that because  of  the  quasi-reciprocal  and circular  nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was  actually  very  likely  to  happen almost immediately.

The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty  sight  as  it  lay beached  like  a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale amongst the laser-lit tracery of its construction gantries, a  brilliant  cloud  of pins   and   needles  of  light  against  the  deep  interstellar blackness; but when launched, it did not even manage to  complete its  very  first  radio  message  -  an SOS - before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.

However, the same event which saw the disastrous failure  of  one science  in its infancy also witnessed the apotheosis of another.  It was conclusively proven that more  people  watched  the  tri-d coverage  of  the  launch  than actually existed at the time, and this has now been recognized as the greatest achievement ever  in the science of audience research.

Another spectacular media event of that time  was  the  supernova which  the  star Ysllodins underwent a few hours later. Ysllodins is the star around which most of  the  Galaxy's  major  insurance underwriters live, or rather lived.

But whilst these spaceships, and other great ones which  come  to mind,  such  as  the Galactic Fleet Battleships - the GSS Daring, the GSS Audacy and the GSS Suicidal Insanity - are all spoken  of with  awe,  pride,  enthusiasm,  affection,  admiration,  regret, jealousy, resentment, in fact most of the better known  emotions, the one which regularly commands the most actual astonishment was Krikkit One, the first spaceship ever  built  by  the  people  of Krikkit. This is not because it was a wonderful ship. It wasn't.

It was a crazy piece of near junk. It looked as if  it  had  been knocked up in somebody's backyard, and this was in fact precisely where it had been knocked up. The  astonishing  thing  about  the ship  was  not  that  it was one well (it wasn't) but that it was done at all. The period of time which  had  elapsed  between  the moment  that  the people of Krikkit had discovered that there was such a thing as space and the launching of their first  spaceship was almost exactly a year.

Ford Prefect was extremely grateful, as he strapped  himself  in, that  this  was  just another Informational Illusion, and that he was therefore completely safe. In real life it wasn't a  ship  he would have set foot in for all the rice wine in China. “Extremely rickety” was one phrase which sprang to mind, and “Please  may  I get out?” was another.

“This is going to fly?” said Arthur, giving gaunt looks,  at  the lashed-together  pipework  and wiring which festooned the cramped interior of the ship.

Slartibartfast  assured  him  that  it  would,  that  they   were perfectly  safe  and  that  it  was  all  going  to  be extremely instructive and not a little harrowing.

Ford and Arthur decided just to relax and be harrowed.

“Why not,” said Ford, “go mad?”

In front of  them  and,  of  course,  totally  unaware  of  their presence  for  the  very  good  reason that they weren't actually there, were the three pilots. They had also constructed the ship.  They  had  been  on  the  hill  path that night singing wholesome heartwarming songs. Their brains had been very slightly turned by the  nearby  crash  of  the alien spaceship. They had spent weeks stripping every tiniest last secret out of the wreckage  of  that burnt-up  spaceship,  all  the  while  singing lilting spaceship-stripping ditties. They had then built their own  ship  and  this was  it.  This  was their ship, and they were currently singing a little  song  about  that  too,  expressing  the  twin  joys   of achievement  and ownership. The chorus was a little poignant, and told of their sorrow that their work  had  kept  them  such  long hours  in  the  garage,  away from the company of their wives and children, who had missed them terribly but had kept them cheerful by  bringing  them  continual stories of how nicely the puppy was growing up.

Pow, they took off.

They roared into the sky like a ship that knew precisely what  it was doing.

“No way,” said Ford a while later after they had  recovered  from the  shock  of  acceleration,  and  were  climbing  up out of the planet's atmosphere, “no way,” he repeated, “does  anyone  design and  build a ship like this in a year, no matter how motivated. I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't  believe  it.” He  shook  his  head thoughtfully and gazed out of a tiny port at the nothingness outside it.

The trip passed uneventfully  for  a  while,  and  Slartibartfast fastwound them through it.

Very quickly, therefore, they arrived at the inner  perimeter  of the  hollow,  spherical Dust Cloud which surrounded their sun and home planet, occupying, as it were, the next orbit out.

It was more as if there was a gradual change in the  texture  and consistency of space. The darkness seemed now to thrum and ripple past them. It was a very cold darkness, a very  blank  and  heavy darkness, it was the darkness of the night sky of Krikkit.

The coldness and heaviness and blankness of it took a  slow  grip on  Arthur's  heart, and he felt acutely aware of the feelings of the Krikkit pilots which hung in the  air  like  a  thick  static charge.  They  were  now  on  the very boundary of the historical knowledge of their race. This was the  very  limit  beyond  which none  of  them  had ever speculated, or even known that there was any speculation to be done.

The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship.  Inside  was  the silence  of  history.  Their  historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible  though  this  thought  was  to  the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.

History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.

Still  the  darkness  thrummed  at  them,  the  blank   enclosing darkness.  It  seemed  closer  and  closer,  thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the  night  in  their  infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep  of the  Galaxy,  itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.

“It'll have to go,” the men of Krikkit said as they  headed  back for home.

On the way back they sang a  number  of  tuneful  and  reflective songs  on  the  subjects  of  peace,  justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 13

“So  you  see,”  said   Slartibartfast,   slowly   stirring   his artificially  constructed  coffee,  and thereby also stirring the whirlpool interfaces between real and unreal numbers, between the interactive perceptions of mind and Universe, and thus generating the restructured matrices  of  implicitly  enfolded  subjectivity which  allowed  his  ship to reshape the very concept of time and space, “how it is.”

“Yes,” said Arthur.

“Yes,” said Ford.

“What do I do,” said Arthur, “with this piece of chicken?”

Slartibartfast glanced at him gravely.

“Toy with it,” he said, “toy with it.”

He demonstrated with his own piece.

Arthur did so, and felt  the  slight  tingle  of  a  mathematical function  thrilling  through  the  chicken  leg as it moved four-dimensionally through what Slartibartfast  had  assured  him  was five-dimensional space.

“Overnight,”  said  Slartibartfast,  "the  whole  population   of

Krikkit   was   transformed   from  being  charming,  delightful,

intelligent ..."

“... if whimsical ...” interpolated Arthur.

“...  ordinary  people,”  said  Slartibartfast,  “into  charming, delightful, intelligent ...”

“... whimsical ...”

“... manic xenophobes. The idea of a  Universe  didn't  fit  into their  world picture, so to speak. They simply couldn't cope with it. And so, charmingly, delightfully, intelligently,  whimsically if you like, they decided to destroy it. What's the matter now?”

“I don't like the wine very much,” said Arthur sniffing it.

“Well, send it back. It's all part of the mathematics of it.”

Arthur did so. He didn't like  the  topography  of  the  waiter's smile, but he'd never liked graphs anyway.

“Where are we going?” said Ford.

“Back   to   the   Room   of   Informational   Illusions,”   said

Slartibartfast,   rising   and   patting   his   mouth  with  the

mathematical representation of a paper napkin,  “for  the  second half.”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 14

“The people of Krikkit,”  said  His  High  Judgmental  Supremacy, Judiciary  Pag,  LIVR  (the  Learned, Impartial and Very Relaxed) Chairman of the Board of Judges at the Krikkit War Crimes  Trial, "are,  well,  you  know, they're just a bunch of real sweet guys, you know, who just happen to want to kill everybody. Hell, I feel the same way some mornings. Shit.

“OK,” he continued, swinging his feet up on to the bench in front of  him  and pausing a moment to pick a thread off his Ceremonial Beach Loafers, “so you  wouldn't  necessarily  want  to  share  a Galaxy with these guys.”

This was true.

The Krikkit attack on the Galaxy had been stunning. Thousands and thousands  of  huge  Krikkit  warships  had leapt suddenly out of hyperspace and simultaneously attacked thousands and thousands of major  worlds, first seizing vital material supplies for building the next wave, and  then  calmly  zapping  those  worlds  out  of existence.

The Galaxy, which had been enjoying a period of unusual peace and prosperity  at  the  time,  reeled like a man getting mugged in a meadow.

“I mean,” continued Judiciary Pag, gazing round the  ultra-modern (this  was  ten billion years ago, when “ultra-modern” meant lots of stainless steel and  brushed  concrete)  and  huge  courtroom, “these guys are just obsessed.”

This too was true, and is the only  explanation  anyone  has  yet managed to come up with for the unimaginable speed with which the people of Krikkit had pursued their new and  absolute  purpose  - the destruction of everything that wasn't Krikkit.

It is also the only  explanation  for  their  bewildering  sudden grasp  of  all  the  hypertechnology  involved  in building their thousands of spaceships,  and  their  millions  of  lethal  white robots.

These had really struck terror into the hearts  of  everyone  who had  encountered  them  -  in most cases, however, the terror was extremely short-lived, as was the person experiencing the terror.  They  were  savage,  single-minded  flying  battle machines. They wielded formidable multifunctional battleclubs which,  brandished one  way, would knock down buildings and, brandished another way, fired blistering Omni-Destructo Zap Rays and, brandished a  third way,  launched  a hideous arsenal of grenades, ranging from minor incendiary devices  to  Maxi-Slorta  Hypernuclear  Devices  which could take out a major sun. Simply striking the grenades with the battleclubs simultaneously primed them, and  launched  them  with phenomenal  accuracy  over  distances  ranging from mere yards to hundreds of thousands of miles.

“OK,” said Judiciary Pag again, “so we won.” He paused and chewed a  little  gum. “We won,” he repeated, “but that's no big deal. I mean a medium-sized galaxy against one little world, and how long did it take us? Clerk of the Court?”

“M'lud?” said the severe little man in black, rising.

“How long, kiddo?”

"It is a trifle difficult, m'lud, to be precise in  this  matter.

Time and distance ..."

“Relax, guy, be vague.”

“I hardly like to be vague, m'lud, over such a ...”

“Bite the bullet and be it.”

The Clerk of the Court blinked at him. It  was  clear  that  like most  of the Galactic legal profession he found Judiciary Pag (or Zipo Bibrok 5 / 108, as his private name was known, inexplicably, to  be) a rather distressing figure. He was clearly a bounder and a cad. He seemed to think that the fact that he was the possessor of  the  finest  legal mind ever discovered gave him the right to behave exactly as he liked, and unfortunately he appeared  to  be right.

“Er, well, m'lud, very approximately, two  thousand  years,”  the Clerk murmured unhappily.

“And how many guys zilched out?”

“Two grillion, m'lud.” The Clerk sat down. A  hydrospectic  photo of  him  at  this  point would have revealed that he was steaming slightly.

Judiciary Pag gazed once more around the courtroom, wherein  were assembled  hundreds  of  the very highest officials of the entire Galactic administration, all  in  their  ceremonial  uniforms  or bodies,  depending  on  metabolism  and  custom. Behind a wall of Zap-Proof Crystal stood a representative group of the  people  of Krikkit,  looking  with  calm,  polite loathing at all the aliens gathered to pass judgment on them. This was  the  most  momentous occasion in legal history, and Judiciary Pag knew it.

He took out his chewing gum and stuck it under his chair.

“That's a whole lotta stiffs,” he said quietly.

The grim silence in the courtroom  seemed  in  accord  with  this view.

“So, like I said, these are a bunch of really sweet guys, but you wouldn't  want  to  share a Galaxy with them, not if they're just gonna keep at it, not if they're  not  gonna  learn  to  relax  a little.  I  mean it's just gonna be continual nervous time, isn't it, right? Pow, pow, pow,  when  are  they  next  coming  at  us?  Peaceful  coexistence is just right out, right? Get me some water somebody, thank you.”

He sat back and sipped reflectively.

“OK,” he said, “hear me, hear me. It's,  like,  these  guys,  you know,  are  entitled  to  their  own  view  of  the Universe. And according to their view,  which  the  Universe  forced  on  them, right,  they  did  right. Sounds crazy, but I think you'll agree.  They believe in ...”

He consulted a piece of paper which he found in the  back  pocket of his Judicial jeans.

“They believe  in  `peace,  justice,  morality,  culture,  sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms'.”

He shrugged.

“I've heard a lot worse,” he said.

He scratched his crotch reflectively.

“Freeeow,” he said. He took another sip of water, then held it up to the light and frowned at it. He twisted it round.

“Hey, is there something in this water?” he said.

“Er, no, m'lud,” said the Court Usher who had brought it to  him, rather nervously.

“Then take it away,” snapped Judiciary Pag, “and put something in it. I got an idea.”

He pushed away the glass and leaned forward.

“Hear me, hear me,” he said.

The solution was brilliant, and went like this:

The planet of Krikkit was to be enclosed  for  perpetuity  in  an envelope  of  Slo-Time,  inside  which life would continue almost infinitely  slowly.  All  light  would  be  deflected  round  the envelope  so  that  it  would  remain invisible and impenetrable.  Escape from the envelope would be utterly  impossible  unless  it were locked from the outside.

When the rest of the Universe came to its  final  end,  when  the whole  of  creation  reached  its  dying  fall  (this was all, of course, in the days before it was  known  that  the  end  of  the Universe  would  be  a spectacular catering venture) and life and matter ceased to exist, then the planet of Krikkit  and  its  sun would  emerge  from its Slo-Time envelope and continue a solitary existence, such as it craved, in the twilight  of  the  Universal void.

The Lock would be on an asteroid which  would  slowly  orbit  the envelope.

The key would be the symbol of the Galaxy - the Wikkit Gate.

By the time the applause in the court had  died  down,  Judiciary Pag was already in the Sens-O-Shower with a rather nice member of the jury that he'd slipped a note to half an hour earlier.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 15

Two months later, Zipo Bibrok 5 / 108 had cut the bottoms off his Galactic  State  jeans, and was spending part of the enormous fee his judgments commanded lying on a jewelled beach having  Essence of  Qualactin rubbed into his back by the same rather nice member of  the  jury.  She  was  a  Soolfinian  girl  from  beyond   the Cloudworlds  of  Yaga.  She had skin like lemon silk and was very interested in legal bodies.

“Did you hear the news?” she said.

“Weeeeelaaaaah!” said Zipo Bibrok 5 / 108, and you would have had to have been there to know exactly why he said this. None of this was on the tape of Informational Illusions, and is all  based  on hearsay.

“No,”  he  added,  when  the  thing  that  had   made   him   say “Weeeeelaaaaah”  had  stopped  happening. He moved his body round slightly to catch the first rays of the  third  and  greatest  of primeval  Vod's  three  suns  which  was  now  creeping  over the ludicrously beautiful horizon, and the  sky  now  glittered  with some of the greatest tanning power ever known.

A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea,  trailed  along the  beach,  and drifted back to sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It  drifted back to sea.

“I hope it isn't good news,” muttered Zipo Bibrok 5 / 108,  “'cos I don't think I could bear it.”

“Your Krikkit judgment was carried  out  today,”  said  the  girl sumptuously.  There  was  no  need  to say such a straightforward thing sumptuously, but she went ahead and did it  anyway  because it  was  that  sort  of day. “I heard it on the radio,” she said, “when I went back to the ship for the oil.”

“Uhuh,” muttered Zipo and rested his head back  on  the  jewelled sand.

“Something happened,” she said.

“Mmmm?”

“Just after the Slo-Time envelope  was  locked,”  she  said,  and paused  a  moment  from  rubbing  in the Essence of Qualactin, “a Krikkit warship which had been missing presumed destroyed  turned out  to be just missing after all. It appeared and tried to seize the Key.”

Zipo sat up sharply.

“Hey, what?” he said.

“it's all right,” she said in a voice which would have calmed the Big  Bang down. “Apparently there was a short battle. The Key and the warship were disintegrated and blasted  into  the  space-time continuum. Apparently they are lost for ever.”

She smiled, and ran a little more Essence of Qualactin on to  her fingertips. He relaxed and lay back down.

“Do what you did a moment or two ago,” he murmured.

“That?” she said.

“No, no,” he said, “that.”

She tried again.

“That?” she asked.

“Weeeeelaaaaah!”

Again, you had to be there.

The fragrant breeze drifted up from the sea again.

A magician wandered along the beach, but no one needed him.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 16

“Nothing  is  lost  for  ever,”  said  Slartibartfast,  his  face flickering  redly  in  the  light  of  the candle which the robot waiter was trying to take away,  “except  for  the  Cathedral  of Chalesm.”

“The what?” said Arthur with a start.

“The Cathedral of  Chalesm,”  repeated  Slartibartfast.  “It  was during  the course of my researches at the Campaign for Real Time that I ...”

“The what?” said Arthur again.

The old man paused and gathered his thoughts, for what  he  hoped would  be one last onslaught on his story. The robot waiter moved through the space-time matrices  in  a  way  which  spectacularly combined  the  surly  with  the obsequious, made a snatch for the candle and got it. They had had the bill, had argued convincingly about  who  had  had  the cannelloni and how many bottles of wine they had had, and, as Arthur had been dimly  aware,  had  thereby successfully manoeuvred the ship out of subjective space and into a parking orbit round  a  strange  planet.  The  waiter  was  now anxious to complete his part of the charade and clear the bistro.

“All will become clear,” said Slartibartfast.

“When?”

“In a minute. Listen. The time streams  are  now  very  polluted.  There's a lot of muck floating about in them, flotsam and jetsam, and more and more of  it  is  now  being  regurgitated  into  the physical world. Eddies in the space-time continuum, you see.”

“So I hear,” said Arthur.

“Look, where are we going?” said Ford,  pushing  his  chair  back from the table with impatience. “Because I'm eager to get there.”

“We are going,” said Slartibartfast in a  slow,  measured  voice, “to  try  to prevent the war robots of Krikkit from regaining the whole of the Key they need to unlock the planet of  Krikkit  from the  Slo-Time  envelope  and  release  the rest of their army and their mad Masters.”

“It's just,” said Ford, “that you mentioned a party.”

“I did,” said Slartibartfast, and hung his head.

He realized that it had been a mistake, because the  idea  seemed to  exercise  a  strange and unhealthy fascination on the mind of Ford Prefect. The more that Slartibartfast  unravelled  the  dark and tragic story of Krikkit and its people, the more Ford Prefect wanted to drink a lot and dance with girls.

The old man felt that he should  not  have  mentioned  the  party until  he  absolutely had to. But there it was, the fact was out, and Ford Prefect had attached himself to it the way  an  Arcturan Megaleach  attaches  itself  to its victim before biting his head off and making off with his spaceship.

“When,” said Ford eagerly, “do we get there?”

“When I've finished telling you why we have to go there.”

“I know why I'm going,” said Ford, and leaned back, sticking  his hands  behind  his  head.  He  gave  one of his smiles which made people twitch.

Slartibartfast had hoped for an easy retirement.

He  had  been  planning  to  learn  to  play   the   octraventral heebiephone  -  a pleasantly futile task, he knew, because he had the wrong number of mouths.

He had also been planning to write an eccentric and  relentlessly inaccurate monograph on the subject of equatorial fjords in order to set the record wrong about  one  or  two  matters  he  saw  as important.

Instead, he had somehow got talked into doing some part-time work for  the  Campaign  for  Real Time and had started to take it all seriously for the first time in his life.  As  a  result  he  now found  himself  spending  his fast-declining years combating evil and trying to save the Galaxy.

He found it exhausting work and sighed heavily.

“Listen,” he said, “at Camtim ...”

“What?” said Arthur.

“The Campaign for Real Time, which I will tell you about later. I noticed that five pieces of jetsam which had in relatively recent times plopped back into existence seemed  to  correspond  to  the five  pieces of the missing Key. Only two I could trace exactly - the Wooden Pillar, which appeared on your planet, and the  Silver Bail.  It  seems to be at some sort of party. We must go there to retrieve it before the Krikkit robots find it, or who knows  what may hap?”

“No,” said Ford firmly. “We must go to  the  party  in  order  to drink a lot and dance with girls.”

“But haven't you understood everything I ...?”

“Yes,” said Ford, with a sudden and unexpected fierceness,  “I've understood  it  all  perfectly well. That's why I want to have as many drinks and dance with as many girls as possible while  there are still any left. If everything you've shown us is true ...”

“True? Of course it's true.”

“... then we don't stand a whelk's chance in a supernova.”

“A what?” said Arthur sharply again. He had  been  following  the conversation  doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the thread now.

“A whelk's chance in a supernova,” repeated Ford  without  losing momentum. “The ...”

“What's a whelk got to do with a supernova?” said Arthur.

“It doesn't,” said Ford levelly, “stand a chance in one.”

He paused to see if the matter was now cleared  up.  The  freshly puzzled  looks  clambering  across Arthur's face told him that it wasn't.

“A supernova,” said Ford as quickly and as clearly as  he  could, “is  a  star which explodes at almost half the speed of light and burns with the brightness of a billion suns and then collapses as a  super-heavy  neutron  star.  It's  a star which burns up other stars, got it? Nothing stands a chance in a supernova.”

“I see,” said Arthur.

“The ...”

“So why a whelk particularly?”

“Why not a whelk? Doesn't matter.”

Arthur accepted this, and Ford continued, picking  up  his  early fierce momentum as best he could.

“The  point  is,”  he  said,  “that  people  like  you  and   me, Slartibartfast, and Arthur - particularly and especially Arthur - are just dilletantes, eccentrics, layabouts, fartarounds  if  you like.”

Slartibartfast  frowned,  partly  in  puzzlement  and  partly  in umbrage. He started to speak.

“- ...” is as far as he got.

“We're not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford.

“...”

"And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against  obsession.

They care, we don't. They win."

“I care about lots of things,”  said  Slartibartfast,  his  voice trembling   partly   with   annoyance,   but   partly  also  with uncertainty.

“Such as?”

“Well,” said  the  old  man,  “life,  the  Universe.  Everything, really. Fjords.”

“Would you die for them?”

“Fjords?” blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. “No.”

“Well then.”

“Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.”

“And I still  can't  see  the  connection,”  said  Arthur,  “with whelks.”

Ford could feel the conversation slipping out of his control, and refused to be sidetracked by anything at this point.

“The point is,” he hissed, “that we are not obsessive people, and we don't stand a chance against ...”

“Except for your sudden obsession with whelks,”  pursued  Arthur, “which I still haven't understood.”

“Will you please leave whelks out of it?”

“I will if you will,” said Arthur. “You brought the subject up.”

“It was an error,” said Ford, “forget them. The point is this.”

He leant forward and rested his  forehead  on  the  tips  of  his fingers.

“What was I talking about?” he said wearily.

“Let's just go down to  the  party,”  said  Slartibartfast,  “for whatever reason.” He stood up, shaking his head.

“I think that's what I was trying to say,” said Ford.

For some unexplained reason, the teleport cubicles  were  in  the bathroom.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 17

Time travel is increasingly regarded  as  a  menace.  History  is being polluted.

The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to  say  on  the  theory  and practice  of  time  travel,  most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics,  and  since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of  confusion as  to  how  the  idea  was  arrived  at  in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel  was,  by its  very  nature,  discovered  simultaneously  at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk.

The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as well.

Here is an example. It may not seem to be  an  important  one  to some  people,  but  to  others  it  is  crucial.  It is certainly significant in that it was the  single  event  which  caused  the Campaign  for Real Time to be set up in the first place (or is it last? It depends which way round you see  history  as  happening, and this too is now an increasingly vexed question).

There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are  widely  regarded  throughout  the Galaxy as being the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land.

They are/were unspeakably wonderful. That is to say, you couldn't speak  very  much  of them at once without being so overcome with emotion, truth and a sense of wholeness  and  oneness  of  things that  you wouldn't pretty soon need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a  quick  glass  of perspective and soda. They were that good.

Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands  of  Effa.  He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of  education  or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest, and  what  he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.

Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of   them  spread  like  morning  sunlight.  For  centuries  they illuminated and watered the lives  of  many  people  whose  lives might otherwise have been darker and drier.

Then, shortly after the invention  of  time  travel,  some  major correcting  fluid  manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to some  high-quality correcting  fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words on that effect.

They travelled the time waves, they found him, they explained the situation  -  with  some  difficulty  -  to  him,  and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such an  effect  that he  became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write which such precision never got around  to  leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently  commuted  to  the future to do chat shows, on which he sparkled wittily.

He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was  a problem,   but   an  easily  solved  one.  The  manufacturers  of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere  with a  copy of a later edition of his book and a stack of dried habra leaves to copy them out on to, making the odd deliberate  mistake and correction on the way.

Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue  that  they  are  exactly  the same as they always were, so what's changed? The first people say that that isn't  the  point.  They aren't quite sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn't it. They set up the Campaign for Real Time to try to  stop this sort of thing going on. Their case was considerably strengthened  by  the  fact  that  a  week  after  they  had  set themselves  up,  news broke that not only had the great Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion refinery, but  that the construction of the refinery had taken so long, and had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion production  to  start  on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly became immensely valuable.

So a lot of history is now gone for ever. The Campaign  for  Real Timers  claim  that  just  as  easy travel eroded the differences between one country  and  another,  and  between  one  world  and another,  so  time  travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another. “The past,” they say, “is now truly  like  a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 18

Arthur materialized, and did so with all the customary staggering about  and  clasping at his throat, heart and various limbs which he still indulged himself  in  whenever  he  made  any  of  these hateful  and  painful materializations that he was determined not to let himself get used to.

He looked around for the others.

They weren't there.

He looked around for the others again.

They still weren't there.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them

He looked around for the others.

They obstinately persisted in their absence.

He closed his eyes again, preparatory to making  this  completely futile  exercise  once more, and because it was only then, whilst his eyes were closed, that his brain began to register  what  his eyes  had  been looking at whilst they were open, a puzzled frown crept across his face.

So he opened his eyes again to check  his  facts  and  the  frown stayed put.

If anything, it intensified, and got a good firm  grip.  If  this was  a  party  it  was  a  very  bad  one,  so bad, in fact, that everybody else had left. He abandoned this  line  of  thought  as futile.  Obviously  this  wasn't  a  party.  It  was a cave, or a labyrinth, or a tunnel of  something  -  there  was  insufficient light  to tell. All was darkness, a damp shiny darkness. The only sounds were the  echoes  of  his  own  breathing,  which  sounded worried.  He coughed very slightly, and then had to listen to the thin ghostly echo of his  cough  trailing  away  amongst  winding corridors and sightless chambers, as of some great labyrinth, and eventually returning to him via the same unseen corridors, as  if to say ... “Yes?”

This happened to every slightest noise he made, and  it  unnerved him.  He  tried to hum a cheery tune, but by the time it returned to him it was a hollow dirge and he stopped.

His mind  was  suddenly  full  of  images  from  the  story  that Slartibartfast had been telling him. He half-expected suddenly to see lethal white robots step silently from the shadows  and  kill him.  He  caught  his breath. They didn't. He let it go again. He didn't know what he did expect.

Someone or something, however, seemed to be expecting him, for at that  moment  there lit up suddenly in the dark distance an eerie green neon sign.

It said, silently:

You have been Diverted

The sign flicked off again, in a way which Arthur was not at  all certain  he  liked.  It  flicked  off with a sort of contemptuous flourish. Arthur then tried to assure himself that this was  just a  ridiculous  trick of his imagination. A neon sign is either on or off, depending on whether it has electricity  running  through it  or  not.  There  was  no  way, he told himself, that it could possibly effect the transition from one state to the other with a contemptuous  flourish. He hugged himself tightly in his dressing gown and shivered, nevertheless.

The neon sign in the depths now suddenly lit up, bafflingly, with just three dots and a comma. Like this:

Only in green neon.

It was trying, Arthur realized after staring at this  perplexedly for  a  second  or  two, to indicate that there was more to come, that the sentence was not complete. Trying with almost superhuman pedantry, he reflected. Or at least, inhuman pedantry.

The sentence then completed itself with these two words:

Arthur Dent.

He reeled. He steadied himself to have another clear look at  it.

It still said Arthur Dent, so he reeled again.

Once again, the sign flicked off, and left him  blinking  in  the darkness  with  just the dim red image of his name jumping on his retina.

Welcome, the sign now suddenly said.

After a moment, it added:

I Don't Think.

The stone-cold fear which had been hovering about Arthur all this time,  waiting for its moment, recognized that its moment had now come and pounced on him. He tried to fight  it  off.  He  dropped into  a kind of alert crouch that he had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with stronger knees. He peered huntedly into the darkness.

“Er, hello?” he said.

He cleared his throat and said it again, more loudly and  without the  “er”.  At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started to beat on a bass drum.

He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating.

He listened for a few seconds more and realized  that  it  wasn't his heart beating, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.

Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves,  and  leapt off.  He  put a hand out on the floor to steady his alert crouch, which wasn't holding up very well. The sign changed itself again.

It said:

Do Not be Alarmed.

After a pause, it added:

Be Very Very Frightened, Arthur Dent.

Once again it flicked off. Once again it left  him  in  darkness.  His  eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn't certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly,  or  if they simply wanted to leave at this point.

“Hello?” he said again, this time trying to put a note of  rugged and aggressive self-assertion into it. “Is anyone there?”

There was no reply, nothing.

This unnerved Arthur Dent even more than a reply would have done, and  he  began  to  back away from the scary nothingness. And the more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while  he realized that the reason for this was because of all the films he had seen in which the hero backs further and  further  away  from some imagined terror in front of him, only to bump into it coming up from behind.

Just then it suddenly  occurred  to  him  to  turn  round  rather quickly.

There was nothing there.

Just blackness.

This really unnerved him, and he started to back away from  that, back the way he had come.

After doing this for a short while it suddenly  occurred  to  him that  he  was  now  backing  towards  whatever it was he had been backing away from in the first place.

This, he couldn't help thinking, must be a foolish thing  to  do.  He  decided  he  would be better off backing the way he had first been backing, and turned around again.

It turned out at this point that his second impulse had been  the correct  one,  because there was an indescribably hideous monster standing quietly behind him. Arthur  yawed  wildly  as  his  skin tried  to  jump  one  way  and his skeleton the other, whilst his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of.

“Bet you weren't expecting to see me again,”  said  the  monster, which  Arthur  couldn't help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing as he had never met the creature before. He could tell  that he hadn't met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights. It was ... it was ... it was ...

Arthur blinked at it. It stood very still. It did look  a  little familiar.

A terrible cold calm came over him as he realized  that  what  he was looking at was a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly.

He wondered why anybody would  be  showing  him  a  six-foot-high hologram  of  a housefly at this time. He wondered whose voice he had heard.

It was a terribly realistic hologram.

It vanished.

“Or perhaps you remember me better,” said the voice suddenly, and it  was a deep, hollow malevolent voice which sounded like molten tar glurping out of a  drum  with  evil  on  its  mind,  “as  the rabbit.”

With a sudden ping,  there  was  a  rabbit  there  in  the  black labyrinth  with  him,  a  huge,  monstrously,  hideously soft and lovable rabbit - an image again, but one on  which  every  single soft and lovable hair seemed like a real and single thing growing in its soft and lovable coat. Arthur was startled to see his  own reflection  in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown eyes.

“Born in darkness,” rumbled the voice, "raised in  darkness.  One morning  I  poked  my head for the first time into the bright new world and got it split open by what felt suspiciously  like  some primitive instrument made of flint.

"Made by you, Arthur Dent, and wielded by you. Rather hard  as  I recall.

"You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in.  I  happen  to  know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you swatted me. Again. Only this time  you  swatted me with the bag you'd made of my previous skin.

“Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless  man,  you are also staggeringly tactless.”

The voice paused whilst Arthur gawped.

“I see you have lost the bag,”  said  the  voice.  “Probably  got bored with it, did you?”

Arthur shook his head helplessly. He wanted to  explain  that  he had  been  in  fact  very fond of the bag and had looked after it very well and had taken it with him wherever he  went,  but  that somehow  every  time he travelled anywhere he seemed inexplicably to end up with the wrong bag and that, curiously enough, even  as they stood there he was just noticing for the first time that the bag he had with him at the moment appeared  to  be  made  out  of rather nasty fake leopard skin, and wasn't the one he'd had a few moments ago before he arrived in this whatever place it was,  and wasn't  one  he  would  have  chosen himself and heaven knew what would be in it as it wasn't his, and he would  much  rather  have his  original  bag  back,  except  that he was of course terribly sorry for having  so  peremptorily  removed  it,  or  rather  its component  parts,  i.e. the rabbit skin, from its previous owner, viz. the rabbit whom he currently had the  honour  of  attempting vainly to address.

All he actually managed to say was “Erp”.

“Meet the newt you trod on,” said the voice.

And there was, standing in the  corridor  with  Arthur,  a  giant green  scaly  newt.  Arthur  turned, yelped, leapt backwards, and found himself standing in the middle of  the  rabbit.  He  yelped again, but could find nowhere to leap to.

“That was me, too,” continued the voice in a low menacing rumble, “as if you didn't know ...”

“Know?” said Arthur with a start. “Know?”

“The interesting thing about reincarnation,”  rasped  the  voice, “is  that  most  people,  most  spirits, are not aware that it is happening to them.”

He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was  concerned  there  was already quite enough effect going on.

“I was aware,” hissed  the  voice,  "that  is,  I  became  aware.

Slowly. Gradually."

He, whoever he was, paused again and gathered breath.

“I could hardly help it, could I?” he bellowed,  "when  the  same thing  kept happening, over and over and over again! Every life I ever lived, I got killed by Arthur Dent. Any world, any body, any time,  I'm  just  getting settled down, along comes Arthur Dent - pow, he kills me.

"Hard not to notice. Bit of a memory jogger. Bit  of  a  pointer.

Bit of a bloody giveaway!

“`That's funny,' my spirit would say to itself as it  winged  its way  back  to  the netherworld after another fruitless Dent-ended venture into the land of the living, `that man who just ran  over me as I was hopping across the road to my favourite pond looked a little familiar ...' And gradually I got to  piece  it  together, Dent, you multiple-me-murderer!”

The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors.  Arthur stood silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.

“Here's the moment, Dent,” shrieked the  voice,  now  reaching  a feverish  pitch  of  hatred,  “here's  the  moment when at last I knew!”

It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly  opened  up in  front  of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but here's an attempt at a description of how hideous it was. It  was a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast, slimy, rough, whale-like creature rolling around  it  and  sliding  over  monstrous  white tombstones.  High  above the cave rose a vast promontory in which could be seen the dark recesses of  two  further  fearful  caves, which ...

Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he  was  looking  at  his  own mouth,  when  his  attention was meant to be directed at the live oyster that was being tipped helplessly into it.

He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.

When he looked again  the  appalling  apparition  had  gone.  The corridor  was  dark  and,  briefly, silent. He was alone with his thoughts. They  were  extremely  unpleasant  thoughts  and  would rather have had a chaperone.

The next noise, when it came, was the low heavy roll of  a  large section  of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just dark blackness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the  same way that a mouse looks into a dark dog-kennel.

And the voice spoke to him again.

“Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent,” it said.  “I  dare  you  to tell me it was a coincidence!”

“It was a coincidence,” said Arthur quickly.

“It was not!” came the answering bellow.

“It was,” said Arthur, “it was ...”

“If it was a coincidence, then my name,” roared  the  voice,  “is not Agrajag!!!”

“And presumably,” said Arthur, “you would  claim  that  that  was your name.”

“Yes!” hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather  deft syllogism.

“Well, I'm afraid it was still a coincidence,” said Arthur.

“Come in here and say that!” howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy again.

Arthur walked in and said that it was a coincidence, or at least, he  nearly said that it was a coincidence. His tongue rather lost its footing towards the end of the last word because  the  lights came up and revealed what it was he had walked into.

It was a Cathedral of Hate.

It was the product of a mind that was  not  merely  twisted,  but actually sprained.

It was huge. It was horrific.

It had a Statue in it.

We will come to the Statue in a moment.

The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had  been carved  out  of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this was that that was precisely what it had been carved  out  of.  It seemed  to  Arthur to spin sickeningly round his head as he stood and gaped at it.

It was black.

Where it wasn't black you were inclined  to  wish  that  it  was, because  the  colours  with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly  across  the  whole  spectrum  of eye-defying  colours  from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow,  Burnt  hombre  and Gan Green on the way.

The unspeakable details  which  these  colours  picked  out  were gargoyles which would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.

The gargoyles  all  looked  inwards  from  the  walls,  from  the pillars,  from  the  flying  buttresses,  from  the choir stalls, towards the Statue, to which we will come in a moment.

And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his  lunch, then it was clear from the gargoyles' faces that the Statue would have put them off theirs, had they been alive to  eat  it,  which they  weren't,  and  had  anybody tried to serve them some, which they wouldn't.

Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone  tablets  in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.

The names of some of those commemorated were underlined  and  had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow which had been slaughtered and of which Arthur Dent had happened to eat a  fillet  steak  would  have the plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish which Arthur had himself caught and  then  decided he  didn't  like  and  left on the side of the plate had a double underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger  added as decoration, just to make the point.

And what was most disturbing  about  all  this,  apart  from  the Statue,  to  which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear implication that all these people and creatures were  indeed  the same person, over and over again.

And it was equally clear that this person was, however  unfairly, extremely upset and annoyed.

In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached  a  level  of annoyance  the like of which had never been seen in the Universe.  It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning searing  flame of  annoyance,  an  annoyance which now spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.

And this annoyance had been given its fullest expression  in  the Statue  in the centre of all this monstrosity, which was a statue of Arthur Dent, and an unflattering one. Fifty feet  tall  if  it was  an  inch,  there  was not an inch of it which wasn't crammed with insult to its subject matter, and fifty feet of that sort of thing  would  be  enough  to  make any subject feel bad. From the small pimple on the side of his nose to the poorish  cut  of  his dressing  gown,  there  was no aspect of Arthur Dent which wasn't lambasted and vilified by the sculptor.

Arthur appeared as  a  gorgon,  an  evil,  rapacious,  ravenning, bloodied  ogre,  slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man Universe.

With each of the thirty arms which  the  sculptor  in  a  fit  of artistic  fervour had decided to give him, he was either braining a rabbit, swatting a fly, pulling a wishbone, picking a flea  out of  his  hair,  or  doing something which Arthur at first looking couldn't quite identify.

His many feet were mostly stamping on ants.

Arthur put his hands over his eyes, hung his head  and  shook  it slowly  from  side to side in sadness and horror at the craziness of things.

And when he opened his eyes again, there in front  of  him  stood the  figure  of  the man or creature, or whatever it was, that he had supposedly been persecuting all this time.

“HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!” said Agrajag.

He, or it, or whatever, looked like a mad  fat  bat.  He  waddled slowly around Arthur, and poked at him with bent claws.

“Look ...!” protested Arthur.

“HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!”  explained  Agrajag,   and   Arthur reluctantly  accepted  this  on  the  grounds  that he was rather frightened by this hideous and strangely wrecked apparition.

Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery.

His batwings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic broken floundering things they were that if they had been strong, muscular beaters of the air. The frightening thing  was  probably the  tenacity of his continued existence against all the physical odds.

He had the most astounding collection of teeth.

They looked as if they each  came  from  a  completely  different animal,  and  they  were  ranged around his mouth at such bizarre angles it seemed that if he ever actually tried to chew  anything he'd  lacerate  half his own face along with it, and possibly put an eye out as well.

Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about  as sane as a fish in a privet bush.

“I was at a cricket match,” he rasped.

This seemed on the face of it such  a  preposterous  notion  that Arthur practically choked.

“Not in this body,” screeched the creature, “not  in  this  body!  This  is  my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get  it, too.”

“But ...”

“I was at,” roared Agrajag, "a cricket match! I had a weak  heart condition,  but  what,  I  said to my wife, can happen to me at a cricket match? As I'm watching, what happens?

“Two people quite maliciously appear out  of  thin  air  just  in front  of  me.  The  last thing I can't help but notice before my poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur  Dent wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?”

“Yes,” said Arthur.

“Coincidence?” screamed the  creature,  painfully  thrashing  its broken  wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a particularly nasty tooth. On closer  examination,  such  as  he'd been  hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag's face was covered with ragged strips of black sticky plasters.

He backed away nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled to  discover  that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He pulled it out and threw it away.

“Look,” he said, "it's just fate playing silly buggers with  you.

With me. With us. It's a complete coincidence."

“What have you got  against  me,  Dent?”  snarled  the  creature, advancing on him in a painful waddle.

“Nothing,” insisted Arthur, “honestly, nothing.”

Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.

“Seems a strange way to relate to  somebody  you've  got  nothing against,  killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social interaction, I would call that. I'd also call it a lie!”

“But look,” said Arthur, “I'm very sorry. There's been a terrible misunderstanding. I've got to go. Have you got a clock? I'm meant to be helping save the Universe.” He backed away still further.

Agrajag advanced still further.

“At one point,” he hissed, “at one point, I decided to  give  up.  Yes,  I would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And what happened?”

Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that  he  had  no idea  and  didn't want to have one either. He found he had backed up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by  who  knew what  Herculean  effort  into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom slippers. He glanced up at his own  horrendously  parodied  image towering  above  him.  He was still puzzled as to what one of his hands was meant to be doing.

“I got  yanked  involuntarily  back  into  the  physical  world,” pursued  Agrajag,  “as  a  bunch  of petunias. In, I might add, a bowl. This particularly happy little lifetime  started  off  with me,  in  my  bowl,  unsupported,  three  hundred  miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. Not  a  naturally  tenable position  for  a  bowl of petunias, you might think. And you'd be right. That life ended a very short while  later,  three  hundred miles  lower.  In, I might add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My spirit brother.”

He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.

“On the way down,”  he  snarled,  “I  couldn't  help  noticing  a flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this flashy-looking  spaceship  was  a   smug-looking   Arthur   Dent.  Coincidence?!!”

“Yes!” yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that  the arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept which leapt easily to the eye.

“I must go,” insisted Arthur.

“You may go,” said Agrajag, “after I have killed you.”

“No, that won't be any use,” explained Arthur, beginning to climb up  the hard stone incline of his carved slipper, “because I have to save the Universe, you see. I have  to  find  a  Silver  Bail, that's the point. Tricky thing to do dead.”

“Save the Universe!” spat Agrajag with contempt. “You should have thought of that before you started your vendetta against me! What about the time you were on Stavromula Beta and someone ...”

“I've never been there,” said Arthur.

“... tried to assassinate you and you ducked. Who  do  you  think the bullet hit? What did you say?”

“Never been there,” repeated Arthur. "What are you talking about?

I have to go."

Agrajag stopped in his tracks.

“You must have been there. You  were  responsible  for  my  death there, as everywhere else. An innocent bystander!” He quivered.

“I've never heard of the place,” insisted Arthur. “I've certainly never had anyone try to assassinate me. Other than you. Perhaps I go there later, do you think?”

Agrajag blinked slowly in a kind of frozen logical horror.

“You haven't been to Stavromula Beta ... yet?” he whispered.

“No,” said Arthur,  "I  don't  know  anything  about  the  place.

Certainly never been to it, and don't have any plans to go."

“Oh, you go there all right,” muttered Agrajag in a broken voice, “you go there all right. Oh zark!” he tottered, and stared wildly about him at his huge Cathedral of Hate. “I've brought  you  here too soon!”

He started to scream and  bellow.  “I've  brought  you  here  too zarking soon!”

Suddenly he rallied, and turned a baleful, hating eye on Arthur.

“I'm going to kill you  anyway!”  he  roared.  “Even  if  it's  a logical impossibility I'm going to zarking well try! I'm going to blow this whole mountain up!” He screamed, “Let's see you get out of this one, Dent!”

He rushed in a painful waddling hobble to what appeared to  be  a small black sacrificial altar. He was shouting so wildly now that he was really carving his face up badly. Arthur leaped down  from his  vantage  place on the carving of his own foot and ran to try to restrain the three-quarters-crazed creature.

He leaped upon him, and brought the strange monstrosity  crashing down on top of the altar.

Agrajag screamed again, thrashed wildly for a brief  moment,  and turned a wild eye on Arthur.

“You know what you've done?” he gurgled painfully.  “You've  only gone  and  killed  me  again.  i  mean, what do you want from me, blood?”

He thrashed again  in  a  brief  apoplectic  fit,  quivered,  and collapsed, smacking a large red button on the altar as he did so.

Arthur started with horror and fear, first at what he appeared to have  done,  and  then at the loud sirens and bells that suddenly shattered the air  to  announce  some  clamouring  emergency.  He stared wildly around him.

The only exit appeared to be  the  way  he  came  in.  He  pelted towards  it,  throwing away the nasty fake leopard-skin bag as he did so.

He dashed randomly, haphazardly through the labyrinthine maze, he seemed  to  be pursued more and more fiercely by claxons, sirens, flashing lights.

Suddenly, he turned a corner and there was a light  in  front  of him.

It wasn't flashing. It was daylight.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 19

Although it has been said that on Earth alone in  our  Galaxy  is Krikkit  (or cricket) treated as fit subject for a game, and that for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this does only  apply to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension. In some of the higher dimensions they feel they  can  more  or  less  please themselves, and have been playing a peculiar game called Brockian Ultra-Cricket for whatever their transdimensional  equivalent  of billions of years is.

 “Let's be blunt, it's a nasty  game”  (says  The  Hitch  Hiker's Guide  to the Galaxy) “but then anyone who has been to any of the higher dimensions will know that they're a pretty  nasty  heathen lot  up  there  who should just be smashed and done in, and would be, too, if anyone could work out a way  of  firing  missiles  at right-angles to reality.”

This is another example of the fact that The Hitch Hiker's  Guide to  the  Galaxy will employ anybody who wants to walk straight in off the street and get ripped off, especially if they  happen  to walk in off the street during the afternoon, when very few of the regular staff are there.

There is a fundamental point here.

The history of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy  is  one  of idealism,  struggle,  despair,  passion,  success,  failure,  and enormously long lunch-breaks.

The earliest origins of the Guide are now, along with most of its financial records, lost in the mists of time.

For other, and more curious theories about where they  are  lost, see below.

Most of the surviving  stories,  however,  speak  of  a  founding editor called Hurling Frootmig.

Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the Guide, established  its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism, and went bust.

There followed many years of penury  and  heart-searching  during which  he  consulted  friends,  sat  in darkened rooms in illegal states of mind, thought about this and that,  fooled  about  with weights,  and  then,  after  a  chance  encounter  with  the Holy Lunching Friars of Voondon (who claimed that just as lunch was at the  centre of a man's temporal day, and man's temporal day could be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should

(a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and

(b) be held in jolly nice restaurants), he refounded  the  Guide, laid  down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and where you could stuff them both, and led  the  Guide  on  to  its first major commercial success.

He also started to develop and explore the role of the  editorial lunch-break which was subsequently to play such a crucial part in the Guide's history, since it meant that most of the actual  work got  done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing.

Shortly  after  this,  the  Guide  was  taken  over  by  Megadodo Publications  of Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on a very sound financial footing, and allowing the  fourth  editor, Lig Lury Jr, to embark on lunch-breaks of such breathtaking scope that even  the  efforts  of  recent  editors,  who  have  started undertaking  sponsored  lunch-breaks  for charity, seem like mere sandwiches in comparison.

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship -  he  merely left  his  office  late one morning and has never since returned.  Though well over a century has now passed, many  members  of  the guide  staff  still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a ham croissant, and will yet return to put  in  a solid afternoon's work.

Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr  have  therefore been designated Acting Editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign which  says “Lig Lury Jr, Editor, Missing, presumed Fed”.

Some very scurrilous and subversive sources hint at the idea that Lig   actually   perished  in  the  Guide's  first  extraordinary experiments in alternative book-keeping. Very little is known  of this,  and  less  still  said. Anyone who even notices, let alone calls attention  to,  the  curious  but  utter  coincidental  and meaningless fact that every world on which the Guide has ever set up an accounting department has shortly  afterwards  perished  in warfare  or  some  natural  disaster,  is  liable  to get sued to smithereens.

It is an interesting though utterly unrelated fact that  the  two or three days prior to the demolition of the planet Earth to make way for a new hyperspace bypass saw a  dramatic  upsurge  in  the number  of  UFO  sightings  there,  not  only above Lords Cricket Ground in St. John's Wood, London, but also above Glastonbury  in Somerset.

Glastonbury had long been associated with myths of ancient kings, witchcraft,  ley-lines  an wart curing, and had now been selected as the site for the new Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  financial  records office,  and  indeed,  ten years' worth of financial records were transferred to a magic hill just  outside  the  city  mere  hours before the Vogons arrived.

None of these facts,  however  strange  or  inexplicable,  is  as strange  or  inexplicable  as  the  rules of the game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set  of rules  is  so  massively complicated that the only time they were all  bound  together  in  a   single   volume,   they   underwent gravitational collapse and became a Black Hole.

A brief summary, however, is as follows:

Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You  won't  need  them, but it keeps the crowds amused.

Rule Two: Find one good Brockian Ultra-Cricket player. Clone  him off  a  few  times.  This  saves  an  enormous  amount of tedious selection and training.

Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large  field and build a high wall round them.

The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport,  the  frustration  experienced  by  the  audience  at  not actually being able to see what's going on leads them to  imagine that it's a lot more exciting than it really is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game  experiences  far  less  life-affirmation  than  a  crowd  that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

Rule Four: Throw lots of assorted  items  of  sporting  equipment over  the  wall for the players. Anything will do - cricket bats, basecube bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you  can  get  a  good swing with.

Rule Five: The players should now lay about  themselves  for  all they are worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player scores a “hit” on another player, he should immediately run  away and apologize from a safe distance.

Apologies should be concise, sincere and, for maximum clarity and points, delivered through a megaphone.

Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.

Curiously enough, the more the obsession with the game  grows  in the higher dimensions, the less it is actually played, since most of the competing teams are now in a state  of  permanent  warfare with  each  other over the interpretation of these rules. This is all for the best, because in the long run a  good  solid  war  is less  psychologically damaging than a protracted game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 20

As Arthur ran darting, dashing and panting down the side  of  the mountain  he  suddenly  felt  the whole bulk of the mountain move very, very slightly beneath him. There was a rumble, a roar,  and a  slight  blurred  movement,  and a lick of heat in the distance behind and above him. He ran in a frenzy of fear. The land  began to  slide, and he suddenly felt the force of the word “landslide” in a way which had never been apparent  to  him  before.  It  had always  just  been  a  word  to  him, but now he was suddenly and horribly aware that sliding is a strange and sickening thing  for land to do. It was doing it with him on it. He felt ill with fear and shaking. The ground slid, the mountain slurred,  he  slipped, he fell, he stood, he slipped again and ran. The avalance began.

Stones, then rocks, then boulders which  pranced  past  him  like clumsy  puppies,  only  much,  much bigger, much, much harder and heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill  you  if  they fell  on you. His eyes danced with them, his feet danced with the dancing ground. He ran as if  running  was  a  terrible  sweating sickness,  his  heart  pounded  to  the  rhythm  of  the pounding geological frenzy around him.

The logic of the situation, i.e. that he  was  clearly  bound  to survive  if  the  next  foreshadowed  incident in the saga of his inadvertent persecution of Agrajag was  to  happen,  was  utterly failing to impinge itself on his mind or exercise any restraining influence on him at this time. He ran with the fear of  death  in him, under him, over him and grabbing hold of his hair.

And suddenly he tripped again  and  was  hurled  forward  by  his considerable  momentum.  But just at the moment that he was about to hit the ground astoundingly hard  he  saw  lying  directly  in front of him a small navy-blue holdall that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage-retrieval system at Athens  airport  some ten  years  in  his  personal  time-scale  previously, and in his astonishment he missed the ground completely and bobbed off  into the air with his brain singing.

What he was doing was this: he was flying. He glanced around  him in  surprise,  but  there could be no doubt that that was what he was doing. No part of him was touching the ground, and no part of him  was  even  approaching it. He was simply floating there with boulders hurtling through the air around him.

He could now do something about  that.  Blinking  with  the  non-effort  of it he wafted higher into the air, and now the boulders were hurtling through the air beneath him.

He looked downwards with intense curiosity. Between him  and  the shivering  ground  were  now some thirty feet of empty air, empty that is if you discounted the boulders which didn't  stay  in  it for  long,  but  bounded downwards in the iron grip of the law of gravity; the same law which seemed, all  of  a  sudden,  to  have given Arthur a sabbatical.

It  occurred  to  him  almost  instantly,  with  the  instinctive correctness  that self-preservation  instils in the mind, that he mustn't try to think about it, that if he did, the law of gravity would suddenly glance sharply in his direction and demand to know what the hell he thought he was doing up  there,  and  all  would suddenly be lost.

So he thought about tulips. It was  difficult,  but  he  did.  He thought  about  the  pleasing  firm  roundness  of  the bottom of tulips, he thought about the interesting variety of colours  they came  in,  and  wondered  what  proportion of the total number of tulips that grew, or had grown,  on  the  Earth  would  be  found within a radius of one mile from a windmill. After a while he got dangerously bored with  this  train  of  thought,  felt  the  air slipping  away  beneath  him, felt that he was drifting down into the paths of the bouncing boulders that he was trying so hard not to  think about, so he thought about Athens airport for a bit and that kept him usefully annoyed for about five minutes  -  at  the end of which he was startled to discover that he was now floating about two hundred yards above the ground.

He wondered for a moment how he was going to get back down to it, but instantly shied away from that area of speculation again, and tried to look at the situation steadily.

He was flying, What was he going to do about it? He  looked  back down  at  the ground. He didn't look at it hard, but did his best just to give it an idle glance, as it  were,  in  passing.  There were  a  couple of things he couldn't help noticing. One was that the eruption of the mountain seemed now to have  spent  itself  - there was a crater just a little way beneath the peak, presumably where the rock  had  caved  in  on  top  of  the  huge  cavernous cathedral,  the statue of himself, and the sadly abused figure of Agrajag.

The other was his  hold-all,  the  one  he  had  lost  at  Athens airport.  It  was  sitting  pertly  on  a  piece of clear ground, surrounded by exhausted boulders but apparently hit  by  none  of them.  Why  this should be he could not speculate, but since this mystery   was   completely   overshadowed   by   the    monstrous impossibility of the bag's being there in the first place, it was not a speculation he really felt strong enough  for  anyway.  The thing  is,  it  was  there.  And the nasty, fake leopard-skin bag seemed to have disappeared, which was all to  the  good,  if  not entirely to the explicable.

He was faced with the fact that he was going to have to pick  the thing  up.  Here he was, flying along two hundred yards above the surface of an alien planet the name of  which  he  couldn't  even remember.  He could not ignore the plaintive posture of this tiny piece of what used to be his life, here, so many light-years from the pulverized remains of his home.

Furthermore, he realized, the bag, if it was still in  the  state in  which  he lost it, would contain a can which would have in it the only Greek olive oil still surviving in the Universe.

Slowly, carefully, inch by  inch,  he  began  to  bob  downwards, swinging  gently  from side to side like a nervous sheet of paper feeling its way towards the ground.

It went well, he was feeling good. The air supported him, but let him  through.  Two  minutes later he was hovering a mere two feet above the bag, and was faced with  some  difficult  decision.  He bobbed  there  lightly.  He  frowned, but again, as lightly as he could.

If he picked the bag up, could he carry it?  Mightn't  the  extra weight just pull him straight to the ground?

Mightn't the  mere  act  of  touching  something  on  the  ground suddenly  discharge   whatever  mysterious  force it was that was holding him in the air?

Mightn't he be better off just being sensible at this  point  and stepping  out  of  the air, back on to the ground for a moment or two?

If he did, would he ever be able to fly again?

The sensation, when he allowed himself to be aware of it, was  so quietly ecstatic that he could not bear the thought of losing it, perhaps for ever. With this worry in mind  he  bobbed  upwards  a little  again,  just  to  try  the feel of it, the surprising and effortless movement of it. He bobbed,  he  floated.  He  tried  a little swoop.

The swoop was terrific. With his arms spread out in front of him, his  hair  and  dressing  gown streaming out behind him, he dived down out of the sky, bellied along a body of air about  two  feet from  the ground and swung back up again, catching himself at the top of the swing and holding. Just holding. He stayed there.

It was wonderful.

And that, he realized, was the way of  picking  up  the  bag.  He would  swoop  down  and catch hold of it just at the point of the upswing. He would carry it on up with him. He might wobble a bit, but he was certain that he could hold it.

He tried one or two more practice swoops, and they got better and better. The air on his face, the bounce and woof of his body, all combined to make him feel an intoxication of the spirit  that  he hadn't  felt  since,  since  -  well as far as he could work out, since he was born. He drifted away on the breeze and surveyed the countryside,  which  was,  he  discovered, pretty nasty. It had a wasted ravaged look. He decided not to look at it  any  more.  He would  just  pick  up the bag and then ... he didn't know what he was going to do after he had picked up the  bag.  He  decided  he would just pick up the bag and see where things went from there.

He judged himself against the wind,  pushed  up  against  it  and turned around. He floated on its body. He didn't realize, but his body was willoming at this point.

He ducked down under the airstream, dipped - and dived.

The air threw itself past him, he thrilled through it. The ground wobbled uncertainly, straightened its ideas out and rose smoothly up to meet him, offering the bag, its cracked plastic handles  up towards him.

Halfway down there was a sudden dangerous moment when he could no longer  believe  he  was doing this, and therefore he very nearly wasn't, but he  recovered  himself  in  time,  skimmed  over  the ground,  slipped  an arm smoothly through the handles of the bag, and began to climb back up, couldn't make it and all of a  sudden collapsed, bruised, scratched and shaking in the stony ground.

He staggered instantly to his feet and swayed hopelessly  around, swinging the bag round him in agony of grief and disappointment.

His feet, suddenly, were stuck heavily to the ground in  the  way they  always  had  been. His body seemed like an unwieldy sack of potatoes that reeled stumbling against the ground, his  mind  had all the lightness of a bag of lead.

He  sagged  and  swayed  and  ached  with  giddiness.  He   tried hopelessly  to  run,  but  his  legs  were  suddenly too weak. He tripped and flopped forward. At that moment he remembered that in the bag he was now carrying was not only a can of Greek olive oil but a duty-free allowance of  retsina,  and  in  the  pleasurable shock  of  that  realization he failed to notice for at least ten seconds that he was now flying again.

He whooped and cried with relief and pleasure, and sheer physical delight.  He  swooped, he wheeled, he skidded and whirled through the air. Cheekily he sat on an updraught  and  went  through  the contents  of  the  hold-all. He felt the way he imagined an angel must feel during its celebrated dance on the head of a pin whilst being  counted  by  philosophers. He laughed with pleasure at the discovery that the bag did in fact contain the olive oil and  the retsina as well as a pair of cracked sunglasses, some sand-filled swimming trunks, some creased postcards of Santorini, a large and unsightly  towel,  some interesting stones, and various scraps of paper with the addresses of people he was relieved  to  think  he would  never meet again, even if the reason why was a sad one. He dropped the stones, put on the sunglasses, and let the pieces  of paper whip away in the wind.

Ten minutes later, drifting idly through a cloud, he got a  large and  extremely  disreputable  cocktail  party in the small of the back.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 21

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into  its fourth  generation,  and still no one shows any signs of leaving.  Somebody did once look at his watch, but that  was  eleven  years ago, and there has been no follow-up.

The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if  you  don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it.

There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and  there  is  one  theory  that  this  is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are  hovering  over  the  thing  like vultures, but you shouldn't believe anything  you  hear  at  parties,  and  particularly  not anything you hear at this one.

One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get worse,  is  that  all  the  people  at  the  party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren  of  the people  who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so on,  it  means  that  all  the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering  idiots,  or,  more and more frequently, both.

Either way, it means that, genetically speaking, each  succeeding generation is now less likely to leave than the preceding one.

So other factors come into operation,  like  when  the  drink  is going to run out.

Now, because of certain things which have happened  which  seemed like  a  good  idea  at  the time (and one of the problems with a party which never stops is that all the things  which  only  seem like  a  good  idea at parties continue to seem like good ideas), that point seems still to be a long way off.

One of the things which seemed like a good idea at the  time  was that  the party should fly - not in the normal sense that parties are meant to fly, but literally.

One night, long ago, a band of  drunken  astro-engineers  of  the first  generation  clambered  round  the  building  digging this, fixing that, banging very hard on the other and when the sun rose the  following morning, it was startled to find itself shining on a building full of happy drunken people which  was  now  floating like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.

Not only that, but the flying  party  had  also  managed  to  arm itself  rather heavily. If they were going to get involved in any petty arguments with wine merchants, they  wanted  to  make  sure they had might on their side.

The transition from full-time cocktail party to part-time raiding party  came with ease, and did much to add that extra bit of zest and swing to the whole affair which  was  badly  needed  at  this point  because  of the enormous number of times that the band had already played all the numbers it knew over the years.

They looted, they raided, they held whole cities for  ransom  for fresh  supplies  of  cheese crackers, avocado dip, spare ribs and wine and spirits, which would now get piped aboard from  floating tankers.

The problem of when the drink is going to run  out  is,  however, going to have to be faced one day.

The planet over which they are floating is no longer  the  planet it was when they first started floating over it.

It is in bad shape.

The party had attacked and raided an awful lot of it, and no  one has  ever succeeded in hitting it back because of the erratic and unpredictable way in which it lurches round the sky.

It is one hell of a party.

It is also one hell of a thing to get hit by in the small of  the back.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 22

 Arthur lay  floundering  in  pain  on  a  piece  of  ripped  and dismembered  reinforced  concrete, flicked at by wisps of passing cloud and confused by the sounds of flabby merrymaking  somewhere indistinctly behind him.

There was  a  sound  he  couldn't  immediately  identify,  partly because  he  didn't  know the tune “I Left my Leg in Jaglan Beta” and partly because the band playing it were very tired, and  some members  of  it were playing it in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed r2,  each according  to  the amount of sleep he'd managed to grab recently.

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself  to  see  where  he  might  be  hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting. He seemed to have sprained his wrist. His back, too, was  hurting,  but  he soon  satisfied  himself  that  he  was  not badly hurt, but just bruised and a little shaken, as  who  wouldn't  be?  He  couldn't understand  what  a  building  would  be doing flying through the clouds.

On the other hand, he would have been a  little  hard-pressed  to come  up  with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so he decided that he and the building were just going  to  have  to accept  each  other. He looked up from where he was lying. A wall of pale but stained stone slabs rose up behind him, the  building proper.  He  seemed  to be stretched out on some sort of ledge or lip which extended outwards for about three or four feet all  the way  around.  It  was  a  hunk  of  the ground in which the party building had had its foundations, and which it  had  taken  along with itself to keep itself bound together at the bottom end.

Nervously, he stood up and, suddenly, looking out over the  edge, he  felt  nauseous  with vertigo. He pressed himself back against the wall,  wet  with  mist  and  sweat.  His  head  was  swimming freestyle, but someone in his stomach was doing the butterfly.

Even though he had got up here under his own power, he could  now not even bear to contemplate the hideous drop in front of him. He was not about to try his luck jumping. He was not about  to  move an inch closer to the edge.

Clutching his hold-all he edged along the wall, hoping to find  a doorway  in. The solid weight of the can of olive oil was a great reassurance to him.

He was edging in the direction of the nearest corner, in the hope that  the  wall  around the corner might offer more in the way of entrances than this one, which offered none.

The unsteadiness of the building's flight made him feel sick with fear,  and  after a short while he took the towel from out of his hold-all and did something with it which once again justified its supreme  position  in  the list of useful things to take with you when you hitch-hike round the Galaxy. He put it over his head  so he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.

His feet edged along the  ground.  His  outstretched  hand  edged along the wall.

Finally he came to the corner, and as his hand rounded the corner it  encountered  something  which  gave  him such a shock that he nearly fell straight off. It was another hand.

The two hands gripped each other.

He desperately wanted to use his other hand  to  pull  the  towel back  from  his  eyes,  but  it was holding the hold-all with the olive oil, the retsina and the postcards from Santorini,  and  he very much didn't want to put it down.

He experienced one of those “self” moments, one of those  moments when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think “Who am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?” He whimpered very slightly.

He tried to free his hand, but he couldn't. The  other  hand  was holding  his  tightly.  He  had  no  recourse but to edge onwards towards the corner. He leaned around it and shook his head in  an attempt to dislodge the towel. This seemed to provoke a sharp cry of some unfashionable emotion from the owner of the other hand.

The towel was whipped from his head and he found his eyes peering into  those of Ford Prefect. Beyond him stood Slartibartfast, and beyond them he could clearly see a porchway and  a  large  closed door.

They were both pressed back against  the  wall,  eyes  wild  with terror as they stared out into the thick blind cloud around them, and tried to resist the lurching and swaying of the building.

“Where the zarking photon have  you  been?”  hissed  Ford,  panic stricken.

“Er, well,” stuttered Arthur, not really knowing how  to  sum  it all up that briefly. “Here and there. What are you doing here?”

Ford turned his wild eyes on Arthur again.

“They won't let us in without a bottle,” he hissed.

The first thing Arthur noticed as they entered into the thick  of the  party,  apart from the noise, the suffocating heat, the wild profusion of colours that protuded dimly through  the  atmosphere of  heavy  smoke,  the  carpets  thick with ground glass, ash and avocado  droppings,  and  the  small  group  of  pterodactyl-like creatures  in  lurex  who  descended  on  his cherished bottle of retsina,  squawking,  “A  new  pleasure,  a  new  pleasure”,  was Trillian being chatted up by a Thunder God.

“Didn't I see you at Milliways?” he was saying.

“Were you the one with the hammer?”

“Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more fraught.”

Squeals of some hideous pleasure rang around the room, the  outer dimensions  of which were invisible through the heaving throng of happy, noisy creatures, cheerfully  yelling  things  that  nobody could hear at each other and occasionally having crises.

“Seems fun,” said Trillian. “What did you say, Arthur?”

“I said, how the hell did you get here?”

“I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe.  Have you met Thor? He makes thunder.”

“Hello,” said Arthur. “I expect that must be very interesting.”

“Hi,” said Thor. “It is. Have you got a drink?”

“Er, no actually ...”

“Then why don't you go and get one?”

“See you later, Arthur,” said Trillian.

Something jogged Arthur's mind, and he looked around huntedly.

“Zaphod isn't here, is he?” he said.

“See you,” said Trillian firmly, “later.”

Thor glared at him with hard coal-black eyes, his beard bristled, what  little light was there was in the place mustered its forces briefly to glint menacingly off the horns of his helmet.

He took Trillian's elbow in his  extremely  large  hand  and  the muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of Volkswagens parking.

He led her away.

“One of the interesting things about being  immortal,”  he  said, “is ...”

“One  of  the  interesting  things  about  space,”  Arthur  heard Slartibartfast  saying  to  a  large  and voluminous creature who looked like someone losing a fight with  a  pink  duvet  and  was gazing  raptly  at  the old man's deep eyes and silver beard, “is how dull it is.”

“Dull?” said the creature, and blinked her  rather  wrinkled  and bloodshot eyes.

“Yes,” said Slartibartfast, “staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so.  You  see,  there's  so  much of it and so little in it. Would you like me to quote some statistics?”

“Er, well ...”

“Please, I would like to.  They,  too,  are  quite  sensationally dull.”

“I'll come back and hear them in a moment,” she said, patting him on  the arm, lifted up her skirts like a hovercraft and moved off into the heaving crown.

“I thought she'd never go,” growled the old man. "Come,  Earthman

..."

“Arthur.”

“We must find the Silver Bail, it is here somewhere.”

“Can't we just relax a little?” Arthur said. “I've  had  a  tough day.  Trillian's  here,  incidentally,  she  didn't  say  how, it probably doesn't matter.”

“Think of the danger to the Universe ...”

“The Universe,” said Arthur, “is big enough  and  old  enough  to look  after  itself  for  half  an hour. All right,” he added, in response to Slartibartfast's increasing agitation,  “I'll  wander round and see if anybody's seen it.”

“Good, good,” said Slartibartfast, “good. ” He plunged  into  the crowd himself, and was told to relax by everybody he passed.

“Have you seen a bail anywhere?” said Arthur to a little man  who seemed  to  be  standing  eagerly  waiting to listen to somebody.  “It's made of silver, vitally important for the future safety  of the Universe, and about this long.”

“No,” said the enthusiastically wizened little man, “but do  have a drink and tell me all about it.”

Ford Prefect writhed past,  dancing  a  wild,  frenetic  and  not entirely  unobscene  dance  with someone who looked as if she was wearing Sydney Opera House on her head. He was yelling  a  futile conversation at her above the din.

“I like that hat!” he bawled.

“What?”

“I said, I like the hat.”

“I'm not wearing a hat.”

“Well, I like the head, then.”

“What?”

“I said, I like the head. Interesting bone-structure.”

“What?”

Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of  other  movements he was performing.

“I said, you dance great,” he shouted, “just don't nod so much.”

“What?”

“It's just that every time you nod,”  said  Ford,  “...  ow!”  he added as his partner nodded forward to say “What?” and once again pecked him sharply on the forehead with  the  sharp  end  of  her swept-forward skull.

“My planet was blown up one morning,” said Arthur, who had  found himself  quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story or, at least, edited highlights of it, “that's  why  I'm  dressed like  this,  in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see. I didn't realize I'd be  coming  to  a party.”

The little man nodded enthusiastically.

“Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing  gown.  Rather  than  the  space  suit one would normally expect. Shortly after that I discovered that my planet had originally  been built for a bunch of mice. You can imagine how I felt about that. I was then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I have been  blown up    ridiculously    often,   shot   at,   insulted,   regularly disintegrated, deprived of tea, and recently  I  crashed  into  a swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave.”

“Ah,” effervesced the little man, “and did you have  a  wonderful time?”

Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.

“What a wonderful exciting cough,” said  the  little  man,  quite startled by it, “do you mind if I join you?”

And with  that  he  launched  into  the  most  extraordinary  and spectacular  fit  of  coughing  which  caught  Arthur  so much by surprise that he started to choke violently,  discovered  he  was already doing it and got thoroughly confused.

Together they performed a lung-busting duet  which  went  on  for fully  two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt.

“So invigorating,” said the little man, panting and wiping  tears from  his  eyes.  “What an exciting life you must lead. Thank you very much.”

He shook Arthur warmly by the hand and walked off into the crowd.

Arthur shook his head in astonishment.

A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type with  a  hook  mouth,  a  lantern  nose,  and  small beady little cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers,  a  black  silk  shirt open  to  what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learnt never to make assumptions about the  anatomies  of  the  sort  of people  he  tended to meet these days, and had all sorts of nasty dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He  carried  something in  a  black  bag,  and  clearly  wanted people to notice that he didn't want them to notice it.

“Hey, er, did I hear you say your name just now?” he said.

This was one  of  the  many  things  that  Arthur  had  told  the enthusiastic little man.

“Yes, it's Arthur Dent.”

The man seemed to be dancing slightly to some rhythm  other  than any of the several that the band were grimly pushing out.

“Yeah,” he said, “only there was a man in a  mountain  wanted  to see you.”

“I met him.”

“Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know.”

“Yes, I met him.”

“Yeah, well I think you should know that.”

“I do. I met him.”

The man paused to chew a little gum. Then he  clapped  Arthur  on the back.

“OK,” he said, “all right. I'm  just  telling  you,  right?  Good night, good luck, win awards.”

“What?” said Arthur, who was beginning to flounder  seriously  at this point.

“Whatever. Do what you do.  Do  it  well.”  He  made  a  sort  of clucking noise with whatever he was chewing and then some vaguely dynamic gesture.

“Why?” said Arthur.

“Do it badly,” said the man, “who cares? Who gives a  shit?”  The blood  suddenly seemed to pump angrily into the man's face and he started to shout.

“Why not go mad?” he said. “Go away, get off my  back  will  you, guy. Just zark off!!!”

“OK, I'm going,” said Arthur hurriedly.

“It's been real.” The man gave a sharp wave and  disappeared  off into the throng.

“What was that about?” said Arthur to a girl  he  found  standing beside him. “Why did he tell me to win awards?”

“Just showbiz talk,” shrugged the girl. “He's just won  an  award at  the  Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards Ceremony, and was  hoping  to  be  able  to  pass  it  off lightly, only you didn't mention it, so he couldn't.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “oh, well I'm sorry  I  didn't.  What  was  it for?”

“The Most  Gratuitous  Use  Of  The  Word  `Fuck'  In  A  Serious Screenplay. It's very prestigious.”

“I see,” said Arthur, “yes, and what do you get for that?”

“A Rory. It's just a small silver thing  set  on  a  large  black base. What did you say?”

"I didn't say anything. I was just about to ask what  the  silver

..."

“Oh, I thought you said `wop'.”

“Said what?”

“Wop.”

People had been dropping in on the  party  now  for  some  years, fashionable  gatecrashers from other worlds, and for some time it had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked  out  at  their own  world  beneath  them,  with  its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards,  its  vast  tracts  of  new desert,  its  seas  full  of biscuit crumbs and worse, that their world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they could manage to stay sober for long enough  to  make  the  entire party  spaceworthy  and  maybe take it off to some other people's worlds where the  air  might  be  fresher  and  give  them  fewer headaches.

The few undernourished farmers who still managed to scratch out a feeble  existence on the half-dead ground of the planet's surface would have been extremely pleased to hear this, but that day,  as the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked up in haggard fear of yet another cheese-and-wine raid, it became clear  that the party was not going to be going anywhere else for a while, that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be time  to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was, what time of year it  was,  and whether  in  any  of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi going anywhere.

The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a  strange  white spaceship  which  seemed to be half sticking through it. Together they were lurching, heaving and spinning their way round the  sky in grotesque disregard of their own weight.

The clouds parted. The air roared and leapt out of their way.

The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their  writhings,  a little  like  two  ducks,  one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, whilst the  second  duck  is  trying very  hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would  want  any  putative  third duck  to  be  made  by  this  particular  first  duck anyway, and certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.

The sky sang and screamed with the rage of it  all  and  buffeted the ground with shock waves.

And suddenly, with a foop, the Krikkit ship was gone.

The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man  leaning against  an  unexpectedly  open  door. It span and wobbled on its hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself  instead.  It staggered back across the sky again.

For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly  they  could not  continue  for  long.  The  party  was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional  broken-backed pirouette could not disguise.

The longer, at this  point,  that  it  avoided  the  ground,  the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.

Inside, things were  not  going  well  either.  They  were  going monstrously  badly, in fact, and people were hating it and saying so loudly. The Krikkit robots had been.

They had removed the Award for The Most  Gratuitous  Use  Of  The Word  `Fuck' In A Serious Screenplay, and in its place had left a scene of devastation that left Arthur feeling almost as sick as a runner-up for a Rory.

“We would love to stay and help,” shouted Ford, picking  his  way over the mangled debris, “only we're not going to.”

The party lurched again, provoking feverish cries and groans from amongst the smoking wreckage.

“We have to go and save the Universe, you see,” said  Ford.  “And if  that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right.  Either way, we're off.”

He suddenly came across an unopened  bottle  lying,  miraculously unbroken, on the ground.

“Do you mind if we take this?” he said.  “You  won't  be  needing it.”

He took a packet of potato crisps too.

“Trillian?” shouted Arthur in a shocked and  weakened  voice.  In the smoking mess he could see nothing.

“Earthman, we must go,” said Slartibartfast nervously.

“Trillian?” shouted Arthur again.

A moment or two later, Trillian staggered,  shaking,  into  view, supported by her new friend the Thunder God.

“The girl stays with me,” said Thor. “There's a great party going on in Valhalla, we'll be flying off ...”

“Where were you when all this was going on?” said Arthur.

“Upstairs,” said Thor, “I was weighing  her.  Flying's  a  tricky business you see, you have to calculate wind ...”

“She comes with us,” said Arthur.

“Hey,” said Trillian, “don't I ...”

“No,” said Arthur, “you come with us.”

Thor looked at him with slowly smouldering eyes.  He  was  making some  point  about  godliness and it had nothing to do with being clean.

“She comes with me,” he said quietly.

“Come on, Earthman,” said Slartibartfast  nervously,  picking  at Arthur's sleeve.

“Come on, Slartibartfast,” said Ford, picking at  the  old  man's sleeve. Slartibartfast had the teleport device.

The party lurched and swayed, sending  everyone  reeling,  except for  Thor  and  except  for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the Thunder God's black eyes.

Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what appeared to  be  his  tiny little fists.

“Want to make something of it?” he said.

“I beg your minuscule pardon?” roared Thor.

“I said,” repeated Arthur, and he could not  keep  the  quavering out  of  his  voice,  “do  you  want to make something of it?” He waggled his fists ridiculously.

Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of  smoke curled upwards from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in it too.

He gripped his belt.

He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was  the sort  of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.

He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it  up in  his hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up any possible misunderstanding that  he  might  merely  have  been carrying a telegraph pole around with him.

“Do I want,” he said, with a hiss like a river flowing through  a steel mill, “to make something of it?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, his voice suddenly and extraordinarily strong and  belligerent.  He waggled his fists again, this time as if he meant it.

“You want to step outside?” he snarled at Thor.

“All right!” bellowed Thor, like an enraged bull (or in fact like an  enraged  Thunder God, which is a great deal more impressive), and did so.

“Good,” said Arthur, “that's got rid of him. Slarty, get  us  out of here.”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 23

“All right,” shouted Ford at Arthur, “so I'm a coward, the  point is   I'm  still  alive.”  They  were  back  aboard  the  Starship Bistromath, so was Slartibartfast, so was Trillian.  Harmony  and concord were not.

“Well, so am I alive, aren't I?” retaliated Arthur, haggard  with adventure  and anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if they wanted to punch each other.

“You damn nearly weren't,” exploded Ford.

Arthur turned sharply to Slartibartfast, who was sitting  in  his pilot  couch  on  the  flight  deck  gazing thoughtfully into the bottom of a bottle which was telling  him  something  he  clearly couldn't fathom. He appealed to him.

“Do you think he understands the first word I've been saying?” he said, quivering with emotion.

“I don't know,” replied Slartibartfast,  a  little  abstractedly.

“I'm  not sure,” he added, glancing up very briefly, “that I do.”

He stared at his instruments with renewed vigor  and  bafflement.

“You'll have to explain it to us again,” he said.

“Well ...”

“But later. Terrible things are afoot.”

He tapped the pseudo-glass of the bottle bottom.

“We fared rather pathetically at the party, I'm afraid,” he said, “and our only hope now is to try to prevent the robots from using the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that I don't  know,”  he muttered. “Just have to go there, I suppose. Can't say I like the idea at all. Probably end up dead.”

“Where is Trillian anyway?” said Arthur with a sudden affectation of  unconcern.  What  he  had  been angry about was that Ford had berated him for wasting time  over  all  the  business  with  the Thunder  God when they could have been making a rather more rapid escape. Arthur's own opinion, and he had offered it for  whatever anybody  might  have  felt  it  was  worth,  was that he had been extraordinarily brave and resourceful.

The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys. What really hurt, though, was that Trillian didn't seem to react much one way or the other  and  had wandered off somewhere.

“And where are my potato crisps?” said Ford.

“They are both,” said Slartibartfast, without looking up, “in the Room  of  Informational  Illusions.  I think that your young lady friend is trying to understand some problems of Galactic history.  I think the potato crisps are probably helping her.”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 24

It is a mistake to think you can solve any  major  problems  just with potatoes.

For instance, there was  once  an  insanely  aggressive  race  of people  called  the  Silastic  Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of their race. The name of their army was something quite  horrific. Luckily they lived even further back in Galactic history than anything we have so far encountered - twenty billion years  ago  - when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one.

And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax  were good  at, and being good at it, they did a lot. They fought their enemies (i.e. everybody else),  they  fought  each  other.  Their planet  was  a  complete  wreck.  The  surface  was littered with abandoned cities which were surrounded by abandoned war machines, which  were  in  turn  surrounded  by  deep  bunkers in which the Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.

The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was  just to  be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way  of life,  one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of energy.

The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him into  a  room of his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.

Eventually they realized that this was something they were  going to  have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of  his  normal  Silastic  work (policemen,  security  guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggressions.

For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be  much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead.

This led to a  renewed  enthusiasm  for  shooting  all  sorts  of things,  and  they  all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for weeks.

Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of  Striterax  is that  they  were  the  first  race  who  ever  managed to shock a computer.

It was a gigantic spaceborne computer  called  Hactar,  which  to this day is remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. It was the first to be built like a natural  brain,  in  that  every cellular  particle  of it carried the pattern of the whole within it, which enabled it to think more  flexibly  and  imaginatively, and also, it seemed, to be shocked.

The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax  were  engaged  in  one  of their  regular  wars  with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and were not enjoying it as much as  usual  because  it  involved  an awful  lot of trekking through the Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda, and across the Fire Mountains  of  Frazfraga,  neither  of  which terrains they felt at home in.

So when the Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak joined  in  the fray and forced them to fight another front in the Gamma Caves of Carfrax and the Ice Storms of  Varlengooten,  they  decided  that enough  was enough, and they ordered Hactar to design for them an Ultimate Weapon.

“What do you mean,” asked Hactar, “by Ultimate?”

To which the Silastic Armorfiends  of  Striterax  said,  “Read  a bloody dictionary,” and plunged back into the fray.

So Hactar designed an Ultimate Weapon.

It was a very, very small bomb which was simply a junction box in hyperspace that would, when activated, connect the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun  simultaneously and thus turn the entire Universe in to one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.

When the Silastic Armorfiends tried  to  use  it  to  blow  up  a Strangulous  Stilettan  munitions dump in one of the Gamma Caves, they were extremely irritated that it didn't work, and said so.

Hactar had been shocked by the whole idea.

He tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate Weapon business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse  than  the known  consequence  of setting it off, and he had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the  design  of  the bomb,  and  he  hoped  that  everyone  involved  would,  on sober reflection, feel that ...

The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer.

Later they thought better of it, and destroyed the faulty bomb as well.

Then, pausing only  to  smash  the  hell  out  of  the  Strenuous Garfighters   of   Stug,   and   the  Strangulous  Stilettans  of Jajazikstak, they went on to find an entirely new way of  blowing themselves  up,  which  was a profound relief to everyone else in the Galaxy, particularly the Garfighters, the Stilettans and  the potatoes.

Trillian had watched all this, as well as the story  of  Krikkit.  She   emerged   from   the   Room   of   informational  Illusions thoughtfully, just in time to discover that they had arrived  too late.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 25

Even as the Starship Bistromath flickered into objective being on the  top of a small cliff on the mile-wide asteroid which pursued a lonely and eternal path  in  orbit  around  the  enclosed  star system of Krikkit, its crew was aware that they were in time only to be witnesses to an unstoppable historic event.

They didn't realize they were going to see two.

They stood cold, lonely  and  helpless  on  the  cliff  edge  and watched  the  activity below. Lances of light wheeled in sinister arcs against the void from a point only  about  a  hundred  yards below and in front of them.

They stared into the blinding event.

An extension of the ship's field enabled them to stand there,  by once  again  exploiting  the mind's predisposition to have tricks played on it: the problems of falling up off the tiny mass of the asteroid, or of not being able to breathe, simply became Somebody Else's.

The white Krikkit warship was parked amongst the stark grey crags of   the   asteroid,   alternately  flaring  under  arclights  or disappearing in shadow. The blackness of the shaped shadows  cast by  the  hard  rocks  danced together in wild choreography as the arclights swept round them.

The eleven white robots were bearing, in procession,  the  Wikkit Key out into the middle of a circle of swinging lights.

The Wikkit Key was rebuilt. Its components shone  and  glittered:

the  Steel  Pillar  (or  Marvin's leg) of Strength and Power, the Gold Bail (or Heart of the Improbability  Drive)  of  Prosperity, the  Perspex Pillar (or Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice) of Science and  Reason,  the  Silver  Bail  (or  Rory  Award  for  The  Most Gratuitous  Use  Of  The Word “Fuck” In A Serious Screenplay) and the now reconstituted Wooden Pillar (or Ashes of  a  burnt  stump signifying   the   death   of  English  cricket)  of  Nature  and Spirituality.

“I suppose there is nothing we  can  do  at  this  point?”  asked Arthur nervously.

“No,” sighed Slartibartfast.

The expression of disappointment which crossed Arthur's face  was a  complete  failure,  and,  since  he  was  standing obscured by shadow, he allowed it to collapse into one of relief.

“Pity,” he said.

“We have no weapons,” said Slartibartfast, “stupidly.”

“Damn,” said Arthur very quietly.

Ford said nothing.

Trillian  said  nothing,  but  in  a  peculiarly  thoughtful  and distinct  way.  She  was  staring  at  the blankness of the space beyond the asteroid.

The asteroid circled the Dust Cloud which surrounded the Slo-Time envelope  which  enclosed  the world on which lived the people of Krikkit, the Masters of Krikkit and their killer robots.

The helpless group had no way  of  knowing  whether  or  not  the Krikkit  robots  were  aware  of  their presence. They could only assume that they must be, but that they felt,  quite  rightly  in the  circumstances,  that  they  had nothing to fear. They had an historic task to perform, and their audience  could  be  regarded with contempt.

“Terrible impotent feeling,  isn't  it?”  said  Arthur,  but  the others ignored him.

In the centre  of  the  area  of  light  which  the  robots  were approaching,  a  square-shaped  crack appeared in the ground. The crack defined itself more and more distinctly, and soon it became clear  that  a  block  of  the ground, about six feet square, was slowly rising.

At the same time they became aware of some other movement, but it was  almost  sublimal,  and  for a moment or two it was not clear what it was that was moving.

Then it became clear.

The asteroid was moving. It was moving slowly in towards the Dust Cloud,  as if being hauled in inexorably by some celestial angler in its depths.

They were to make in real life  the  journey  through  the  Cloud which  they  had  already  made  in  the  Room  of  Informational Illusions. They stood frozen in silence. Trillian frowned.

An age seemed to  pass.  Events  seemed  to  pass  with  spinning slowness,  as  the  leading  edge of the asteroid passed into the vague and soft outer perimeter of the Cloud.

And soon they were engulfed in a thin and dancing obscurity. They passed  on through it, on and on, dimly aware of vague shapes and whorls indistinguishable in the darkness except in the corner  of the eye.

The Dust dimmed the shafts of  brilliant  light.  The  shafts  of brilliant light twinkled on the myriad specks of Dust.

Trillian,  again,  regarded  the  passage  from  within  her  own frowning thoughts.

And they were through it. Whether it had taken a minute  or  half an  hour  they  weren't  sure,  but  they  were  through  it  and confronted with a fresh blankness, as if space were  pinched  out of existence in front of them.

And now things moved quickly.

A blinding shaft of light seemed almost to explode  from  out  of the  block  which had risen three feet out of the ground, and out of that rose a smaller  Perspex  block,  dazzling  with  interior dancing colours.

The block was slotted with deep groves,  three  upright  and  two across, clearly designed to accept the Wikkit key.

The robots approached the Lock, slotted the Key into its home and stepped back again. The block twisted round of is own accord, and space began to alter.

As space unpinched itself, it seemed  agonizingly  to  twist  the eyes  of  the  watchers  in  their sockets. They found themselves staring, blinded, at an unravelled sun  which  stood  now  before them  where it seemed only seconds before there had not been even empty space. It was  a  second  or  two  before  they  were  even sufficiently  aware  of what had happened to throw their hands up over their horrified blinded eyes. In that second  or  two,  they were  aware  of a tiny speck moving slowly across the eye of that sun.

They staggered back, and heard ringing in their ears the thin and unexpected chant of the robots crying out in unison.

“Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit!”

The sound chilled them. It was harsh, it was cold, it was  empty, it was mechanically dismal.

It was also triumphant.

They were so stunned by these two sensory shocks that they almost missed the second historic event.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to  survive  a  direct blast  attack  from  the  Krikkit  robots, ran out of the Krikkit warship brandishing a Zap gun.

“OK,” he cried, “the situation is totally  under  control  as  of this moment in time.”

The single robot guarding the hatchway to the ship silently swung his  battleclub,  and connected it with the back of Zaphod's left head.

“Who  the  zark  did  that?”  said  the  left  head,  and  lolled sickeningly forward.

His right head gazed keenly into the middle distance.

“Who did what?” it said.

The club connected with the back of his right head.

Zaphod measured his length as  a  rather  strange  shape  on  the ground.

Within a matter of seconds the whole event was over. A few blasts from  the robots were sufficient to destroy the Lock for ever. It split and melted and splayed its contents  brokenly.  The  robots marched  grimly and, it almost seemed, in a slightly disheartened manner, back into their warship which, with a “foop”, was gone.

Trillian and Ford ran hectically round and down the steep incline to the dark, still body of Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 26

“I don't know,” said Zaphod, for what  seemed  to  him  like  the thirty-seventh time, “they could have killed me, but they didn't.  Maybe they just  thought  I  was  a  kind  of  wonderful  guy  or something. I could understand that.”

The others silently registered their opinions of this theory.

Zaphod lay on the cold floor of the flight deck. His back  seemed to  wrestle  the  floor as pain thudded through him and banged at his heads.

“I think,” he whispered, “that  there  is  something  wrong  with those anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird.”

“They are programmed to kill everybody,”  Slartibartfast  pointed out.

“That,” wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, “could be it.”

He didn't seem altogether convinced.

“Hey, baby,” he said to Trillian, hoping this would make  up  for his previous behaviour.

“You all right?” she said gently.

“Yeah,” he said, “I'm fine.”

“Good,” she said, and walked away to think.  She  stared  at  the huge  visiscreen  over the flight couches and, twisting a switch, she flipped local images over it. One image was the blankness  of the  Dust  Cloud.  One  was  the  sun of Krikkit. One was Krikkit itself. She flipped between them fiercely.

“Well, that's goodbye Galaxy, then,” said  Arthur,  slapping  his knees and standing up.

“No,” said Slartibartfast, gravely. “Our  course  is  clear.”  He furrowed  his  brow until you could grow some of the smaller root vegetables in it. He stood up, he paced  around.  When  he  spoke again,  what  he  said  frightened him so much he had to sit down again.

“We must go down to Krikkit,” he said. A deep sigh shook his  old frame and his eyes seemed almost to rattle in their sockets.

“Once again,”  he  said,  “we  have  failed  pathetically.  Quite pathetically.”

“That,” said Ford quietly, “is because we don't  care  enough.  I told you.”

He swung his feet up on the instrument panel and picked  fitfully at something on one of his fingernails.

“But unless we determine  to  take  action,”  said  the  old  man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, “then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die.  Surely we care about that?”

“Not enough to want to get killed over it,” said Ford. He put  on a  sort  of  hollow smile and flipped it round the room at anyone who wanted to see it.

Slartibartfast  clearly  found  this  point  of  view   extremely seductive and he fought against it. He turned again to Zaphod who was gritting his teeth and sweating with the pain.

“You surely must have some idea,” he said, “of  why  they  spared your life. It seems most strange and unusual.”

“I kind of think they didn't even know,” shrugged Zaphod. “I told you. They hit me with the most feeble blast, just knocked me out, right? They lugged me into their ship, dumped me  into  a  corner and  ignored me. Like they were embarrassed about me being there.  If I said anything they knocked me out again. We had  some  great conversations.  `Hey  ...  ugh!'  `Hi  there  ... ugh!' `I wonder ...ugh!' Kept me amused for hours, you know.” He winced again.

He was toying with something in his fingers. He held  it  up.  It was  the Gold Bail - the Heart of Gold, the heart of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Only that and the Wooden Pillar had survived the destruction of the Lock intact.

“I hear your ship can move a bit,” he said.  “So  how  would  you like to zip me back to mine before you ...”

“Will you not help us?” said Slartibartfast.

“I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy,” insisted Zaphod, rising himself up on to his shoulders, “but I have the mother and father of a pair of  headaches,  and  I  feel  a  lot  of  little headaches coming on. But next time it needs saving, I'm your guy.  Hey, Trillian baby?”

She looked round briefly.

“Yes?”

“You want to come? Heart of Gold? Excitement  and  adventure  and really wild things?”

“I'm going down to Krikkit,” she said.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 27

It was the same hill, and yet not the same.

This time it was not an Informational Illusion. This was  Krikkit itself and they were standing on it. Near them, behind the trees, stood the strange Italian restaurant  which  had  brought  these, their real bodies, to this, the real, present world of Krikkit.

The strong grass under their feet was real, the  rich  soil  real too.  The  heady  fragrances  from  the tree, too, were real. The night was real night.

Krikkit.

Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy  for  anyone  who isn't  a Krikkiter to stand. The place that could not countenance the existence of any other  place,  whose  charming,  delightful, intelligent  inhabitants  would  howl  with  fear,  savagery  and murderous hate when confronted with anyone not their own.

Arthur shuddered.

Slartibartfast shuddered.

Ford, surprisingly, shuddered.

It was not surprising that he shuddered, it was  surprising  that he  was  there  at  all. But when they had returned Zaphod to his ship Ford had felt unexpectedly shamed into not running away.

Wrong, he thought to himself, wrong wrong  wrong.  He  hugged  to himself  one of the Zap guns with which they had armed themselves out of Zaphod's armoury.

Trillian shuddered, and frowned as she looked into the sky.

This, too, was not the same. It was no longer blank and empty.

Whilst the countryside around them had changed little in the  two thousand  years of the Krikkit wars, and the mere five years that had elapsed locally since Krikkit  was  sealed  in  its  Slo-Time envelope   ten  billion  years  ago,  the  sky  was  dramatically different.

Dim lights and heavy shapes hung in it.

High in the sky, where no Krikkiter ever  looked,  were  the  War Zones,  the Robot Zones - huge warships and tower blocks floating in the Nil-O-Grav fields far above the idyllic pastoral lands  of the surface of Krikkit.

Trillian stared at them and thought.

“Trillian,” whispered Ford Prefect to her.

“Yes?” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“Do you always breathe like that when you're thinking?”

“I wasn't aware that I was breathing.”

“That's what worried me.”

“I think I know ...” said Trillian.

“Shhhh!” said Slartibartfast in alarm,  and  his  thin  trembling hand motioned them further back beneath the shadow of the tree.

Suddenly, as before in the tape, there were lights  coming  along the  hill  path,  but  this  time the dancing beams were not from lanterns but electric torches - not in itself a dramatic  change, but  every  detail  made  their hearts thump with fear. This time there were no lilting whimsical songs about flowers  and  farming and dead dogs, but hushed voices in urgent debate.

A light moved in the sky with slow weight.  Arthur  was  clenched with  a  claustrophobic  terror  and  the warm wind caught at his throat.

Within seconds a second party became  visible,  approaching  from the  other  side  of  the dark hill. They were moving swiftly and purposefully, their torches swinging and probing around them.

The parties were clearly converging, and  not  merely  with  each other. They were converging deliberately on the spot where Arthur and the others were standing.

Arthur heard the slight rustle as Ford Prefect raised his Zap gun to   his   shoulder,   and   the   slight   whimpering  cough  as Slartibartfast raised his. He felt the cold unfamiliar weight  of his own gun, and with shaking hands he raised it.

His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch  and  engage  the extreme  danger  catch  as  Ford had shown him. He was shaking so much that if he'd fired at anybody at  that  moment  he  probably would have burnt his signature on them.

Only Trillian didn't raise her  gun.  She  raised  her  eyebrows, lowered them again, and bit her lip in thought.

“Has it occurred to you,” she began, but nobody wanted to discuss anything much at the moment.

A light stabbed through the darkness from behind  them  and  they span  around  to  find  a  third party of Krikkiters behind them, searching them out with their torches.

Ford Prefect's gun crackled viciously, but fire spat back  at  it and it crashed from his hands.

There was a moment of pure fear, a frozen  second  before  anyone fired again.

And at the end of the second nobody fired.

They were surrounded  by  pale-faced  Krikkiters  and  bathed  in bobbing torch light.

The captives stared at their captors, the captors stared at their captives.

“Hello?” said one of the captors. “Excuse me,  but  are  you  ...  aliens?”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 28

Meanwhile,  more  millions  of  miles  away  than  the  mind  can comfortably  encompass,  Zaphod  Beeblebrox  was  throwing a mood again.

He had repaired his ship -  that  is,  he'd  watched  with  alert interest  whilst  a service robot had repaired it for him. It was now, once again, one of the most powerful and extraordinary ships in  existence. He could go anywhere, do anything. He fiddled with a book, and then tossed it away. It was the one he'd read before.

He walked over to the communications  bank  and  opened  an  all-frequencies emergency channel.

“Anyone want a drink?” he said.

“This an emergency, feller?” crackled a voice from halfway across the Galaxy.

“Got any mixers?” said Zaphod.

“Go take a ride on a comet.”

“OK, OK,” said Zaphod and flipped  the  channel  shut  again.  He sighed  and  sat  down.  He  got  up again and wandered over to a computer screen. He pushed a few buttons. Little blobs started to rush around the screen eating each other.

“Pow!” said Zaphod. “Freeeoooo! Pop pop pop!”

“Hi there,” said the computer brightly after a  minute  of  this, “you have scored three points. Previous best score, seven million five hundred and ninety-seven thousand, two hundred and ...”

“OK, OK,” said Zaphod and flipped the screen blank again.

He sat down again. He played with a pencil. This too began slowly to lose its fascination.

“OK, OK,” he said, and fed his score and the  previous  one  into the computer.

His ship made a blur of the Universe.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 29

“Tell us,” said the thin, pale-faced Krikkiter  who  had  stepped forward from the ranks of the others and stood uncertainly in the circle of torchlight, handling his gun as if he was just  holding it  for someone else who'd just popped off somewhere but would be back in a minute, “do you know anything  about  something  called the Balance of Nature?”

There was no reply from their captives, or at least nothing  more articulate than a few confused mumbles and grunts. The torchlight continued to play over them. High in  the  sky  above  them  dark activity continued in the Robot zones.

“It's just,” continued  the  Krikkiter  uneasily,  “something  we heard  about,  probably  nothing  important. Well, I suppose we'd better kill you then.”

He looked down at his gun as if he was trying to find  which  bit to press.

“That is,” he said, looking up again,  “unless  there's  anything you want to chat about?”

Slow, numb astonishment crept up the  bodies  of  Slartibartfast, Ford  and  Arthur.  Very  soon it would reach their brains, which were at the moment solely occupied with moving their jawbones  up and  down. Trillian was shaking her head as if trying to finish a jigsaw by shaking the box.

“We're worried, you see,” said another man from the crowd, “about this plan of universal destruction.”

“Yes,” added another, “and the balance of nature. It just  seemed to  us that if the whole of the rest of the Universe is destroyed it will somehow upset the balance of nature. We're quite keen  on ecology, you see.” His voice trailed away unhappily.

“And sport,” said another, loudly. This got a cheer  of  approval from the others.

“Yes,” agreed the first, “and sport ...” He looked  back  at  his fellows  uneasily  and scratched fitfully at his cheek. He seemed to be wrestling with some deep inner confusion, as if  everything he  wanted  to  say  and  everything  he  thought  were  entirely different  things,  between  which  he  could  see  no   possible connection.

“You see,” he mumbled, “some of us  ...”  and  he  looked  around again as if for confirmation. The others made encouraging noises.  “Some of us,” he continued, “are  quite  keen  to  have  sporting links  with  the  rest  of  the  Galaxy, and though I can see the argument about keeping sport out of politics, I think that if  we want to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy, which we do, then it's probably a mistake to destroy it.  And  indeed  the rest of the Universe ...” his voice trailed away again “... which is what seems to be the idea now ...”

“Wh ...” said Slartibartfast. “Wh ...”

“Hhhh ... ?” said Arthur.

“Dr ...” said Ford Prefect.

“OK,” said Trillian. “Let's talk about it.”  She  walked  forward and  took the poor confused Krikkiter by the arm. He looked about twenty-five, which meant, because of the  peculiar  manglings  of time that had been going on in this area, that he would have been just twenty when the Krikkit  Wars  were  finished,  ten  billion years ago.

Trillian led him for a short walk through the  torchlight  before she  said  anything  more. He stumbled uncertainly after her. The encircling torch beams were drooping now slightly as if they were abdicating  to this strange, quiet girl who alone in the Universe of dark confusion seemed to know what she was doing.

She turned and faced him, and lightly held both his arms. He  was a picture of bewildered misery.

“Tell me,” she said.

He said nothing for a moment, whilst his gaze darted from one  of her eyes to the other.

“We ...” he said, “we have to be alone ... I think.”  He  screwed up  his  face  and then dropped his head forward, shaking it like someone trying to shake a coin out of a money box. He  looked  up again.  “We  have  this bomb now, you see,” he said, “it's just a little one.”

“I know,” she said.

He goggled at her as if she'd said something very  strange  about beetroots.

“Honestly,” he said, “it's very, very little.”

“I know,” she said again.

“But they say,” his voice trailed on, “they say  it  can  destroy everything that exists. And we have to do that, you see, I think.  Will that make us alone?  I  don't  know.  It  seems  to  be  our function, though,” he said, and dropped his head again.

“Whatever that means,” said a hollow voice from the crowd.

Trillian slowly put her arms around  the  poor  bewildered  young Krikkiter and patted his trembling head on her shoulder.

“It's all right,” she said quietly but clearly enough for all the shadowy crowd to hear, “you don't have to do it.”

She rocked him.

“You don't have to do it,” she said again.

She let him go and stood back.

“I want you to do something for me,” she said,  and  unexpectedly laughed.

“I want,” she said, and laughed again. She put her hand over  her mouth  and then said with a straight face, “I want you to take me to your leader,” and she pointed into the War Zones in  the  sky.  She seemed somehow to know that their leader would be there.

Her laughter seemed to discharge  something  in  the  atmosphere.  From somewhere at the back of the crowd a single voice started to sing a tune which would  have  enabled  Paul  McCartney,  had  he written it, to buy the world.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 30

Zaphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like  the  hell of  a  guy  he  was. He was very confused, but continued crawling doggedly anyway because he was that brave.

He was confused by something he had just seen, but  not  half  as confused as he was going to be by something he was about to hear, so it would now be best to explain exactly where he was.

He was in the Robot War Zones many miles above the surface of the planet Krikkit.

The atmosphere was thin here and relatively unprotected from  any rays or anything which space might care to hurl in his direction.

He had parked  the  starship  Heart  of  Gold  amongst  the  huge jostling  dim  hulks that crowded the sky here above Krikkit, and had entered what appeared to be the biggest and most important of the sky buildings, armed with nothing but a Zap gun and something for his headaches.

He had found himself in a long, wide and badly  lit  corridor  in which  he  was able to hide until he worked out what he was going to do next. He hid because every now and then one of the  Krikkit robots  would  walk along it, and although he had so far led some kind of charmed life at their hands, it had nevertheless been  an extremely  painful  one,  and he had no desire to stretch what he was only half-inclined to call his good fortune.

He  had  ducked, at one  point,  into  a  room  leading  off  the corridor,  and  had  discovered it to be a huge and, again, dimly lit chamber.

In fact, it was a museum with just one exhibit - the wreckage  of a spacecraft. It was terribly burnt and mangled, and, now that he had caught up with some of the Galactic  history  he  had  missed through  his  failed  attempts  to  have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him at school, he was  able  to  put  in  an intelligent  guess  that this was the wrecked spaceship which had drifted through the Dust Cloud all those billions  of  years  ago and started the whole business off.

But, and  this  is  where  he  had  become  confused,  there  was something not at all right about it.

It was genuinely wrecked. It was genuinely burnt,  but  a  fairly brief inspection by an experienced eye revealed that it was not a genuine spacecraft. It was as if it was a full-scale model of one - a solid blueprint. In other words it was a very useful thing to have around if you suddenly decided to build a spaceship yourself and  didn't know how to do it. It was not, however, anything that would ever fly anywhere itself.

He was still puzzling over this - in fact he'd only just  started to  puzzle  over  it  - when he became aware that a door had slid open in another part  of  the  chamber,  and  another  couple  of Krikkit robots had entered, looking a little glum.

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding  that  just as  discretion was the better part of valour so was cowardice the better  part  of  discretion,  he  valiantly  hid  himself  in  a cupboard.

The cupboard in fact turned out to be the top  part  of  a  shaft which   led   down  through  an  inspection  hatch  into  a  wide ventilation tunnel. He led himself down into it  and  started  to crawl along it, which is where we found him.

He  didn't  like  it.  It   was   cold,   dark   and   profoundly uncomfortable,  and it frightened him. At the first opportunity - which was another shaft  a  hundred  yards  further  along  -  he climbed back up out of it.

This time he emerged into a smaller chamber, which appeared to be a computer intelligence centre. He emerged in a dark narrow space between a large computer bank and the wall.

He quickly learned that he was  not  alone  in  the  chamber  and started  to leave again, when he began to listen with interest to what the other occupants were saying.

“It's the robots, sir,” said one voice. “There's something  wrong with them.”

“What, exactly?”

These were the voices of two War Command Krikkiters. All the  War Commanders  lived  up in the sky in the Robot War Zones, and were largely immune to the whimsical doubts  and  uncertainties  which were afflicting their fellows down on the surface of the planet.

"Well, sir I think it's just as well that they are  being  phased

out  of the war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the

supernova bomb. In the very short time  since  we  were  released

from the envelope -"

“Get to the point.”

“The robots aren't enjoying it, sir.”

“What?”

“The war, sir, it seems  to  be  getting  them  down.  There's  a certain  world-weariness  about  them,  or  perhaps  I should say Universe-weariness.”

“Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping  to  destroy it.”

“Yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are  afflicted with  a  certain  lassitude.  They're just finding it hard to get behind the job. They lack oomph.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir.”

“What on Krikkit are you talking about?”

“Well, in the few skirmishes they've had recently, it seems  that they  go  into  battle,  raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is  it  all  about?  And they just seem to get a little tired and a little grim.”

“And then what do they do?”

“Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly  difficult  ones by all accounts. And then they sulk.”

“Sulk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Whoever heard of a robot sulking?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“What was that noise?”

It was the noise of Zaphod leaving with his head spinning.

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 31

In a deep well of darkness a crippled  robot  sat.  It  had  been silent  in  its  metallic darkness for some time. It was cold and damp, but being a robot it was supposed not to be able to  notice these  things.  With  an enormous effort of will, however, it did manage to notice them.

Its brain had been harnessed to the central intelligence core  of the  Krikkit War Computer. It wasn't enjoying the experience, and neither was the central intelligence  core  of  the  Krikkit  War Computer.

The  Krikkit  robots  which  had  salvaged  this  pathetic  metal creature  from  the  swamps of Squornshellous Zeta had recognized almost immediately its gigantic intelligence, and the  use  which this could be to them.

They hadn't reckoned with the  attendant  personality  disorders, which  the  coldness, the darkness, the dampness, the crampedness and the loneliness were doing nothing to decrease.

It was not happy with its task.

Apart from anything else, the  mere  coordination  of  an  entire planet's  military strategy was taking up only a tiny part of its formidable mind, and the rest of it had become  extremely  bored.  Having  solved  all  the  major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological,    sociological,     philosophical,     etymological, meteorological  and psychological problems of the Universe except his own, three times over, he was severely stuck for something to do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone, or indeed tune. The latest one was a lullaby.

“Now the world has gone to bed,” Marvin droned,

"Darkness won't engulf my head,

"I can see by infra-red,

“How I hate the night.”

He paused to gather the artistic and emotional strength to tackle the next verse.

"Now I lay me down to sleep,

"Try to count electric sheep,

"Sweet dream wishes you can keep,

“How I hate the night.”

“Marvin!” hissed a voice.

His head snapped up, almost dislodging the intricate  network  of electrodes  which  connected  him  to  the  central  Krikkit  War Computer.

An inspection hatch had opened and one of a pair of unruly  heads was  peering  through  whilst  the  other  kept  on jogging it by continually  darting  to  look  this  way  and   that   extremely nervously.

“Oh, it's you,” muttered the robot. “I might have known.”

“Hey, kid,” said Zaphod in astonishment, “was  that  you  singing just then?”

“I  am,”   Marvin   acknowledged   bitterly,   “in   particularly scintillating form at the moment.”

Zaphod poked his head in through the hatchway and looked around.

“Are you alone?” he said.

“Yes,” said Marvin. “Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my  only companions. And vast intelligence of course. And infinite sorrow.  And ...”

“Yeah,” said Zaphod. “Hey, what's your connection with all this?”

“This,” said Marvin, indicating with his less damaged arm all the electrodes which connected him with the Krikkit computer.

“Then,” said Zaphod awkwardly, “I guess you must  have  saved  my life. Twice.”

“Three times,” said Marvin.

Zaphod's head snapped round (his other one was looking  hawkishly in  entirely  the wrong direction) just in time to see the lethal killer robot directly behind him seize up and start to smoke.  It staggered  backwards and slumped against a wall. It slid down it.  It slipped sideways, threw its  head  back  and  started  to  sob inconsolably.

Zaphod looked back at Marvin.

“You must have a terrific outlook on life,” he said.

“Just don't even ask,” said Marvin.

“I won't,” said Zaphod, and didn't. “Hey look,” he added, “you're doing a terrific job.”

“Which means, I suppose,” said Marvin,  requiring  only  one  ten thousand  million  billion trillion grillionth part of his mental powers to make this particular logical  leap,  “that  you're  not going to release me or anything like that.”

“Kid, you know I'd love to.”

“But you're not going to.”

“No.”

“I see.”

“You're working well.”

“Yes,” said Marvin. “Why stop now just when I'm hating it?”

“I got to find Trillian and the guys. Hey,  you  any  idea  where they  are? I mean, I just got a planet to choose from. Could take a while.”

“They are very close,” said Marvin dolefully.  “You  can  monitor them from here if you like.”

“I better go get them,” asserted Zaphod.  “Er,  maybe  they  need some help, right?”

“Maybe,” said Marvin with unexpected authority in his  lugubrious voice,  “it would be better if you monitored them from here. That young  girl,”  he  added  unexpectedly,  “is  one  of  the  least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.”

Zaphod took a  moment  or  two  to  find  his  way  through  this labyrinthine  string  of  negatives  and emerged at the other end with surprise.

“Trillian?”  he  said.  “She's  just  a  kid.  Cute,  yeah,   but temperamental.  You  know  how  it  is with women. Or perhaps you don't. I assume you don't. If you do I don't want to  hear  about it. Plug us in.”

“... totally manipulated.”

“What?” said Zaphod.

It was Trillian speaking. He turned round.

The wall against which the Krikkit robot was sobbing had  lit  up to  reveal a scene taking place in some other unknown part of the Krikkit Robot War zones. It seemed to be  a  council  chamber  of some  kind  -  Zaphod couldn't make it out too clearly because of the robot slumped against the screen.

He tried to move the robot, but it was heavy with its  grief  and tried to bite him, so he just looked around as best he could.

“Just think about it,” said Trillian's voice,  “your  history  is just  a  series  of  freakishly  improbable events. And I know an improbable event when I see one. Your complete isolation from the Galaxy  was freakish for a start. Right out on the very edge with a Dust Cloud around you. It's a set-up. Obviously.”

Zaphod was mad with  frustration  because  he  couldn't  see  the screen.  The  robot's  head  was obscuring his view of the people Trillian as  talking  to,  his  multi-functional  battleclub  was obscuring the background, and the elbow of the arm it had pressed tragically against its brow was obscuring Trillian herself.

“Then,” said Trillian, “this spaceship that crash-landed on  your planet. That's really likely, isn't it? Have you any idea of what the  odds  are  against   a   drifting   spaceship   accidentally intersecting with the orbit of a planet?”

“Hey,” said Zaphod, “she doesn't know what the zark she's talking about. I've seen that spaceship. It's a fake. No deal.”

“I thought it might be,”  said  Marvin  from  his  prison  behind Zaphod.

“Oh yeah,” said Zaphod. “It's easy for you to say  that.  I  just told you. Anyway, I don't see what it's got to do with anything.”

“And  especially,”  continued  Trillian,  “the  odds  against  it intersecting  with  the orbit of the one planet in the Galaxy, or the whole of the Universe as far as I know, that would be totally traumatized  to  see it. You don't know what the odds are? Nor do I, they're  that  big.  Again,  it's  a  set-up.  I  wouldn't  be surprised if that spaceship was just a fake.”

Zaphod managed to move the robot's battleclub. Behind it  on  the screen  were  the  figures of Ford, Arthur and Slartibartfast who appeared astonished and bewildered by the whole thing.

“Hey, look,” said Zaphod excitedly. “The guys are doing great. Ra ra ra! Go get 'em, guys.”

“And  what  about,”  said  Trillian,  "all  this  technology  you suddenly  managed  to build for yourselves almost overnight? Most people would take thousands of years to do all that. Someone  was feeding  you  what you needed to know, someone was keeping you at it.

“I  know,  I  know,”  she  added  in  response   to   an   unseen interruption, “I know you didn't realize it was going on. This is exactly my point. You never realized anything at all.  Like  this Supernova Bomb.”

“How do you know about that?” said an unseen voice.

“I just know,” said Trillian. “You expect me to believe that  you are  bright  enough to invent something that brilliant and be too dumb to realize it would take you with it  as  well?  That's  not just stupid, that is spectacularly obtuse.”

“Hey, what's this bomb thing?” said Zaphod in alarm to Marvin.

“The supernova bomb?” said  Marvin.  “It's  a  very,  very  small bomb.”

“Yeah?”

“That would destroy the Universe in toto,”  added  Marvin.  “Good idea, if you ask me. They won't get it to work, though.”

“Why not, if it's so brilliant?”

“It's brilliant,” said Marvin, “they're not. They got as  far  as designing  it  before  they  were locked in the envelope. They've spent the last five years building it. They think they've got  it right  but  they  haven't. They're as stupid as any other organic life form. I hate them.”

Trillian was continuing.

Zaphod tried to pull the Krikkit robot away by its  leg,  but  it kicked  and growled at him, and then quaked with a fresh outburst of sobbing. Then  suddenly  it  slumped  over  and  continued  to express its feelings out of everybody's way on the floor.

Trillian was standing alone in the middle of  the  chamber  tired out but with fiercely burning eyes.

Ranged in front of her were the  pale-faced  and  wrinkled  Elder Masters of Krikkit, motionless behind their widely curved control desk, staring at her with helpless fear and hatred.

In front of them, equidistant between their control desk and  the middle  of the chamber, where Trillian stood, as if on trial, was a slim white pillar about four feet tall. On top of  it  stood  a small white globe, about three, maybe four inches in diameter.

Beside  it  stood  a  Krikkit  robot  with  its  multi-functional battleclub.

“In fact,” explained Trillian, “you are so dumb stupid” (She  was sweating. Zaphod felt that this was an unattractive thing for her to be doing at this point) “you are all so  dumb  stupid  that  I doubt, I very much doubt, that you've been able to build the bomb properly without any help from Hactar for the last five years.”

“Who's this guy Hactar?” said Zaphod, squaring his shoulders.

If Marvin replied, Zaphod didn't hear him. All his attention  was concentrated on the screen.

One of the Elders of Krikkit made a small motion  with  his  hand towards the Krikkit robot. The robot raised his club.

“There's nothing I can do,” said Marvin. “It's on an  independent circuit from the others.”

“Wait,” said Trillian.

The Elder  made  a  small  motion.  The  robot  halted.  Trillian suddenly seemed very doubtful of her own judgment.

“How do you know all this?” said Zaphod to Marvin at this point.

“Computer records,” said Marvin. “I have access.”

“You're very different, aren't you,” said Trillian to  the  Elder Masters,  “from your fellow worldlings down on the ground. You've spent all your lives up  here,  unprotected  by  the  atmosphere.  You've  been  very  vulnerable.  The  rest  of  your race is very frightened, you know, they don't want you to do this. You're  out of touch, why don't you check up?”

The Krikkit Elder grew impatient. He made a gesture to the  robot which  was precisely the opposite of the gesture he had last made to it.

The robot swung its battleclub. It hit the small white globe.

The small white globe was the supernova bomb.

It was a very, very small bomb which was designed  to  bring  the entire Universe to an end.

The supernova bomb flew through the air. It hit the back wall  of the council chamber and dented it very badly.

“So how does she know all this?” said Zaphod.

Marvin kept a sullen silence.

“Probably just bluffing,” said Zaphod. “Poor kid, I should  never have left her alone.”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 32

“Hactar!” called Trillian. “What are you up to?”

There was no reply from the enclosing darkness. Trillian  waited, nervously.  She  was  sure that she couldn't be wrong. She peered into the gloom from which she had been  expecting  some  kind  of response. But there was only cold silence.

“Hactar?” she called again. "I would like you to meet  my  friend Arthur  Dent.  I  wanted  to  go  off  with a Thunder God, but he wouldn't let me and I appreciate that. He made me  realize  where my  affections really lay. Unfortunately Zaphod is too frightened by all this, so I brought Arthur instead. I'm not  sure  why  I'm telling you all this.

“Hello?” she said again. “Hactar?”

And then it came.

It was thin and feeble, like a voice carried on the wind  from  a great distance, half heard, a memory of a dream of a voice.

“Won't you both come out,” said the voice. “I  promise  that  you will be perfectly safe.”

They glanced at each other, and  then  stepped  out,  improbably, along  the shaft of light which streamed out of the open hatchway of the Heart of Gold into the dim granular darkness of  the  Dust Cloud.

Arthur tried to hold her hand to steady and reassure her, but she wouldn't let him. He held on to his airline hold-all with its tin of Greek  olive  oil,  its  towel,  its  crumpled  postcards   of Santorini  and its other odds and ends. He steadied and reassured that instead.

They were standing on, and in, nothing.

Murky, dusty nothing.  Each  grain  of  dust  of  the  pulverized computer sparkled dimly as it turned and twisted slowly, catching the sunlight in the darkness. Each particle of the computer, each speck  of  dust,  held  within  itself,  faintly  and weakly, the pattern of the whole.  In  reducing  the  computer  to  dust  the Silastic   Armorfiends  of  Striterax  had  merely  crippled  the computer, not killed it. A weak and insubstantial field held  the particles in slight relationships with each other.

Arthur and Trillian stood, or rather floated, in  the  middle  of this  bizarre  entity.  They  had nothing to breathe, but for the moment this seemed not to matter. Hactar kept his  promise.  They were safe. For the moment.

“I have nothing to offer you by way of hospitality,” said  Hactar faintly,  “but  tricks  of  the  light.  It  is  possible  to  be comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all  you have.”

His voice evanesced, and in the dark dust a long velvet  paisley-covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape.

Arthur could hardly bear the fact that it was the same sofa which had appeared to him in the fields of prehistoric Earth. He wanted to shout and shake with rage that the Universe kept  doing  these insanely bewildering things to him.

He let  this  feeling  subside,  and  then  sat  on  the  sofa  - carefully. Trillian sat on it too.

It was real.

At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that  is what  sofas  are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa.

The voice on the solar wind breathed to them again.

“I hope you are comfortable,” it said.

They nodded.

“And I would like to congratulate you on  the  accuracy  of  your deductions.”

Arthur quickly pointed out that he hadn't deduced  anything  much himself,  Trillian  was  the  one. She had simply asked him along because he was interested in life, the Universe, and everything.

“That is something  in  which  I  too  am  interested,”  breathed Hactar.

“Well,” said Arthur, "we should have a chat  about  it  sometime.

Over a cup of tea."

There slowly materialized in front of them a small  wooden  table on which sat a silver teapot, a bone china milk jug, a bone china sugar bowl, and two bone china cups and saucers.

Arthur reached forward, but they were just a trick of the  light.  He  leaned  back  on the sofa, which was an illusion his body was prepared to accept as comfortable.

“Why,” said Trillian, “do  you  feel  you  have  to  destroy  the Universe?”

She found it a little difficult talking  into  nothingness,  with nothing  on  which  to  focus.  Hactar obviously noticed this. He chuckled a ghostly chuckle.

“If it's going to be that sort of session,” he said, “we  may  as well have the right sort of setting.”

And now there materialized in front of them something new. It was the  dim  hazy  image  of  a  couch - a psychiatrist's couch. The leather with which it was upholstered was  shiny  and  sumptuous, but again, it was only a trick of the light.

Around them, to complete the setting, was the hazy suggestion  of wood-panelled  walls.  And then, on the couch, appeared the image of Hactar himself, and it was an eye-twisting image.

The couch looked normal size for a psychiatrist's couch  -  about five or six feet long.

The computer looked normal size for a black space-borne  computer satellite - about a thousand miles across.

The illusion that the one was sitting on top of the other was the thing which made the eyes twist.

“All right,” said Trillian firmly. She stood up off the sofa. She felt  that  she  was  being  asked to feel too comfortable and to accept too many illusions.

“Very good,” she said. “Can you construct real things too? I mean solid objects?”

Again there was a pause before the answer, as if  the  pulverized mind  of Hactar had to collect its thoughts from the millions and millions of miles over which it was scattered.

“Ah,” he sighed. “You are thinking of the spaceship.”

Thoughts seemed to drift by them and  through  them,  like  waves through the ether.

“Yes,” he acknowledge, "I can.

“But it takes enormous effort and time. All I can do  in  my  ...  particle  state, you see, is encourage and suggest. Encourage and suggest. And suggest ...”

The image of Hactar on the couch seemed to billow and  waver,  as if finding it hard to maintain itself.

It gathered new strength.

“I can encourage and suggest,” it said,  “tiny  pieces  of  space debris  -  the  odd  minute  meteor,  a few molecules here, a few hydrogen atoms  there  -  to  move  together.  I  encourage  them together. I can tease them into shape, but it takes many aeons.”

“So, did you make,” asked  Trillian  again,  “the  model  of  the wrecked spacecraft?”

“Er ... yes,” murmured Hactar. “I have made ... a few  things.  I can  move  them  about.  I made the spacecraft. It seemed best to do.”

Something then made Arthur pick up his hold-all from where he had left it on the sofa and grasp it tightly.

The mist of Hactar's ancient shattered mind swirled about them as if uneasy dreams were moving through it.

“I repented, you see,” he  murmured  dolefully.  “I  repented  of sabotaging my own design for the Silastic Armorfiends. It was not my place to make such decisions.  I  was  created  to  fulfill  a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence.”

Hactar sighed, and they waited in silence for him to continue his story.

“You were right,” he said at length. "I deliberately nurtured the planet  of  Krikkit  till  they would arrive at the same state of mind as the Silastic Armorfiends, and require of me the design of the bomb I failed to make the first time. I wrapped myself around the planet and coddled it. Under the influence of  events  I  was able  to  generate,  they  learned to hate like maniacs. I had to make them live in the sky. On the ground my influences  were  too weak.

"Without me, of course, when they were locked away from me in the envelope  of  Slo-Time,  their responses became very confused and they were unable to manage.

“Ah well, ah well,” he added, “I was only trying  to  fulfill  my function.”

And very gradually, very, very slowly, the images  in  the  cloud began to fade, gently to melt away.

And then, suddenly, they stopped fading.

“There was also the matter of revenge, of course,”  said  Hactar, with a sharpness which was new in his voice.

“Remember,” he said, “that I was pulverized, and then left  in  a crippled  and  semi-impotent  state  for  billions  of  years.  I honestly would rather wipe out the Universe. You would  feel  the same way, believe me.”

He paused again, as eddies swept through the Dust.

“But primarily,” he said in his  former,  wistful  tone,  “I  was trying to fulfill my function. Ah well.”

Trillian said, “Does it worry you that you have failed?”

“Have I failed?” whispered Hactar. The image of the  computer  on the psychiatrist's couch began slowly to fade again.

“Ah well, ah well,” the fading voice intoned again. “No,  failure doesn't bother me now.”

“You know what we have to do?” said Trillian, her voice cold  and businesslike.

“Yes,” said Hactar, “you're going to disperse me. You  are  going to destroy my consciousness. Please be my guest - after all these aeons, oblivion is all I crave. If I haven't already fulfilled my function, then it's too late now. Thank you and good night.”

The sofa vanished.

The tea table vanished.

The couch and the computer vanished. the walls were gone.  Arthur and Trillian made their curious way back into the Heart of Gold.

“Well, that,” said Arthur, “would appear to be that.”

The flames danced higher in front of him and then subsided. A few last  licks  and  they were gone, leaving him with just a pile of Ashes, where a few minutes previously there had been  the  Wooden Pillar of Nature and Spirituality.

He  scooped  them  off  the hob of  the  Heart  of  Gold's  Gamma barbecue,  put  them  in  a  paper  bag, and walked back into the bridge.

“I think we should take them back,” he said. “I  feel  that  very strongly.”

He had already  had  an  argument  with  Slartibartfast  on  this matter,  and  eventually the old man had got annoyed and left. he had returned to his own ship the Bistromath, had  a  furious  row with  the  waiter and disappeared off into an entirely subjective idea of what space was.

The argument had arisen because Arthur's idea  of  returning  the Ashes  to Lord's Cricket Ground at the same moment that they were originally taken would involve travelling back in time a  day  or so,   and   this   was  precisely  the  sort  of  gratuitous  and irresponsible mucking about that the Campaign for Real  Time  was trying to put a stop to.

“Yes,” Arthur had said, “but you try  and  explain  that  to  the MCC,” and he would hear no more against the idea.

“I think,” he said again, and stopped. The reason he  started  to say  it  again  was  because no one had listened to him the first time, and the reason he stopped  was  because  it  looked  fairly clear that no one was going to listen to him this time either.

Ford, Zaphod and Trillian were watching the visiscreens  intently as  Hactar  was  dispersing under pressure from a vibration field which the Heart of Gold was pumping into it.

“What did it say?” asked Ford.

“I thought I heard it say,” said  Trillian  in  a  puzzle  voice, “`What's done is done ... I have fulfilled my function ...'”

“I think we should take these back,” said Arthur holding  up  the bag containing the Ashes. “I feel that very strongly.”

"Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Chapter 33

The sun was shining calmly on a scene of complete havoc.

Smoke was still billowing across the burnt grass in the  wake  of the  theft of the Ashes by the Krikkit robots. Through the smoke, people were running panicstricken,  colliding  with  each  other, tripping over stretchers, being arrested.

One policeman was attempting to arrest Wowbagger  the  Infinitely Prolonged  for insulting behaviour, but was unable to prevent the tall grey-green alien from returning to his ship  and  arrogantly flying away, thus causing even more panic and pandemonium.

In the middle of this, for the second time  that  afternoon,  the figures  of  Arthur  Dent and Ford Prefect suddenly materialized, they had teleported down out of the Heart of Gold which  was  now in parking orbit round the planet.

“I can explain,” shouted Arthur. “I have the  Ashes!  They're  in this bag.”

“I don't think you have their attention,” said Ford.

“I have also helped save the Universe,” called Arthur  to  anyone who was prepared to listen, in other words no one.

“That should have been a crowd-stopper,” said Arthur to Ford.

“It wasn't,” said Ford.

Arthur accosted a policeman who was running past.

“Excuse me,” he said. “The Ashes. I've got them. They were stolen by  those  white  robots a moment ago. I've got them in this bag.  They were part of the Key to the Slo-Time envelope, you see, and, well,  anyway  you can guess the rest, the point is I've got them and what should I do with them?”

The policeman told him, but Arthur could only assume that he  was speaking metaphorically.

He wandered about disconsolately.

“Is no one interested?” he shouted out. A man rushed past him and jogged  his  elbow,  he  dropped  the  paper bag and it spilt its contents all over the ground. Arthur stared down  at  it  with  a tight-set mouth.

Ford looked at him.

“Wanna go now?” he said.

Arthur heaved a heavy sigh. He looked around at the planet Earth, for what he was now certain would be the last time.

“OK,” he said.

At that moment, through the clearing smoke, he  caught  sight  of one of the wickets, still standing in spite of everything.

“Hold on a moment,” he said to Ford. “When I was a boy ...”

“Can you tell me later?”

“I had a passion for cricket, you know, but I wasn't very good at it.”

“Or not at all, if you prefer.”

“And I always dreamed, rather stupidly, that one day I would bowl at Lord's.”

He looked around him at the  panicstricken  throng.  No  one  was going to mind very much.

“OK,” said Ford wearily. “Get it  over  with.  I  shall  be  over there,”  he added, “being bored.” He went and sat down on a patch of smoking grass.

Arthur remembered that on their first visit there that afternoon, the  cricket  ball  had actually landed in his bag, and he looked through the bag.

He  had already found the ball in it before he remembered that it wasn't  the  same bag that he'd had at the time. Still, there the ball was amongst his souvenirs of Greece.

He took it out and polished it against his hip, spat  on  it  and polished  it  again. He put the bag down. He was going to do this properly.

He tossed the small hard red ball from hand to hand, feeling  its weight.

With a wonderful feeling of lightness and unconcern,  he  trotted off  away  from  the  wicket. A medium-fast pace, he decided, and measured a good long run-up.

He looked up into the sky. The birds were wheeling  about  it,  a few  white  clouds  scudded across it. The air was disturbed with the sounds of police and ambulance sirens, and  people  screaming and yelling, but he felt curiously happy and untouched by it all.  He was going to bowl a ball at Lord's.

He turned and pawed a couple of times  at  the  ground  with  his bedroom  slippers.  He  squared his shoulders, tossed the ball in the air and caught it again.

He started to run.

As he ran, he saw that standing at the wicket was a batsman.

Oh, good, he thought, that should add a little ...

Then, as his running feet took him nearer, he saw  more  clearly.  The  batsman  standing  ready  at  the  wicket was not one of the England cricket team. He was not one of  the  Australian  cricket team.  It was one of the robot Krikkit team. It was a cold, hard, lethal white killer-robot that presumably had not returned to its ship with the others.

Quite a few thoughts  collided  in  Arthur  Dent's  mind  at  tis moment,  but  he  didn't  seem  to  be able to stop running. Time seemed to be going terribly, terribly slowly, but still he didn't seem to be able to stop running.

Moving as if through syrup, he slowly turned  his  troubled  head and  looked at his own hand, the hand which was holding the small hard red ball.

His feet were pounding slowly onwards, unstoppably, as he  stared at  the ball gripped in his helpless hand. It was emitting a deep red glow and flashing intermittently. And  still  his  feet  were pounding inexorably forward.

He looked at the Krikkit robot again  standing  implacably  still and purposefully in front of him, battleclub raised in readiness.  Its eyes were burning with a deep  cold  fascinating  light,  and Arthur  could  not  move  his own eyes from them. He seemed to be looking down a tunnel at them - nothing on either side seemed  to exist.

Some of the thoughts which were colliding in  his  mind  at  this time were these:

He felt a hell of a fool.

He felt that he should have listened rather more carefully  to  a number  of  things  he  had heard said, phrases which now pounded round in his mind as his feet pounded onwards to the point  where he  would  inevitably  release the ball to the Krikkit robot, who would inevitably strike it.

He remembered Hactar saying,  “Have  I  failed?  Failure  doesn't bother me.”

He remembered the account of Hactar's dying words,  “What's  done is done, I have fulfilled my function.”

He remembered Hactar saying that he had managed to  make  “a  few things.”

He remembered the sudden movement in his hold-all that  had  made him grip it tightly to himself when he was in the Dust Cloud.

He remembered that he had travelled back in time a couple of days to come to Lord's again.

He also remembered that he wasn't a very good bowler.

He felt his arm coming round, gripping tightly  on  to  the  ball which  he now knew for certain was the supernova bomb that Hactar had built himself and planted on him, the bomb which would  cause the Universe to come to an abrupt and premature end.

He hoped and prayed that  there  wasn't  an  afterlife.  Then  he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

He would feel very, very embarrassed meeting everybody.

He hoped, he hoped, he hoped that his bowling was as  bad  as  he remembered it to be, because that seemed to be the only thing now standing between this moment and universal oblivion.

He felt his legs pounding, he felt his arm coming round, he  felt his  feet connecting with the airline hold-all he'd stupidly left lying on the ground in front of  him,  he  felt  himself  falling heavily  forward  but,  having his mind so terribly full of other things at this moment, he completely  forgot  about  hitting  the ground and didn't.

Still holding the ball firmly in his right hand he soared up into the air whimpering with surprise.

He wheeled and whirled through the air, spinning out of control.

He twisted down towards the ground, flinging  himself  hectically through the air, at the same time hurling the bomb harmlessly off into the distance.

He hurtled towards the astounded robot from behind. It still  had its  multi-functional  battleclub  raised,  but had suddenly been deprived of anything to hit.

With a sudden mad access of strength, he wrestled the  battleclub from  the grip of the startled robot, executed a dazzling banking turn in the air, hurtled back down in a furious  power-drive  and with  one  crazy  swing knocked the robot's head from the robot's shoulders.

“Are you coming now?” said Ford.

Epilogue:

Life, the Universe and Everything

And at the end they travelled again.

There was a time when Arthur Dent would not.  He  said  that  the Bistromathic  Drive  had  revealed  to him that time and distance were one, that mind and Universe were one,  that  perception  and reality  were  one,  and that the more one travelled the more one stayed in one place, and that what with one thing and another  he would rather just stay put for a while and sort it all out in his mind, which was now at one with the Universe so it shouldn't take too  long,  and  he  could  get  a good rest afterwards, put in a little flying practice and learn to  cook  which  he  had  always meant  to  do. The can of Greek olive oil was now his most prized possession, and he said that the way it had  unexpectedly  turned up in his life had again given him a certain sense of the oneness of things which made him feel that ...

He yawned and fell asleep.

In the morning as they prepared to take him  to  some  quiet  and idyllic  planet  where  they  wouldn't mind him talking like that they suddenly picked  up  a  computer-driven  distress  call  and diverted to investigate.

A small but apparently undamaged spacecraft of the  Merida  class seemed  to  be  dancing  a strange little jig through the void. A brief computer scan revealed that the ship was fine, its computer was fine, but that its pilot was mad.

“Half-mad, half-mad,” the  man  insisted  as  they  carried  him, raving, aboard.

He was a journalist  with  the  Siderial  Daily  Mentioner.  They sedated  him  and  sent  Marvin  in  to keep him company until he promised to try and talk sense.

“I was covering a trial,” he said at last, “on Argabuthon.”

He pushed himself up on to his thin wasted  shoulders,  his  eyes stared  wildly.  His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it knew in the next room.

“Easy, easy,” said Ford. Trillian put  a  soothing  hand  on  his shoulder.

The man sank back down again and stared at  the  ceiling  of  the ship's sick bay.

“The case,” he said, “is now immaterial, but there was a  witness ...  a  witness  ...  a man called ... called Prak. A strange and difficult man. They were eventually forced to administer  a  drug to make him tell the truth, a truth drug.”

His eyes rolled helplessly in his head.

“They gave him too much,” he said in a tiny whimper.  “They  gave him  much  too much.” He started to cry. “I thing the robots must have jogged the surgeon's arm.”

“Robots?” said Zaphod sharply. “What robots?”

“Some white robots,” whispered the man hoarsely, “broke into  the courtroom  and  stole the judge's sceptre, the Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice, nasty Perspex thing. I don't  know  why  they  wanted it.”  He  began  to  cry  again.  “And  I  think  they jogged the surgeon's arm ...”

He shook his head loosely from side to side,  helplessly,  sadly, his eyes screwed up in pain.

“And when the trial continued,” he said  in  a  weeping  whisper, “they  asked  Prak  a most unfortunate thing. They asked him,” he paused and shivered, “to tell the  Truth,  the  Whole  Truth  and Nothing but the Truth. Only, don't you see?”

He suddenly hoisted himself up on to his elbows again and shouted at them.

“They'd given him much too much of the drug!”

He collapsed again, moaning quietly. “Much too much too much  too much too ...”

The group gathered round his bedside glanced at each other. there were goose pimples on backs.

“What happened?” said Zaphod at last.

“Oh, he told it all right,” said the man  savagely,  “for  all  I know  he's  still  telling  it  now. Strange, terrible things ...  terrible, terrible!” he screamed.

They tried to calm him, but he struggled to his elbows again.

“Terrible things, incomprehensible things,” he  shouted,  “things that would drive a man mad!”

He stared wildly at them.

“Or in my case,” he said, “half-mad. I'm a journalist.”

“You  mean,”  said  Arthur  quietly,  “that  you  are   used   to confronting the truth?”

“No,” said the man with a puzzled frown. “I mean that I  made  an excuse and left early.”

He collapsed into a coma from which he recovered  only  once  and briefly.

On that one occasion, they discovered from him the following:

When it became clear that Prak could not be  stopped,  that  here was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.

Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it.  Steel walls  were  erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side, barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps  and  three  major armies  were  installed,  so  that no one would ever have to hear Prak speak.

“That's a pity,” said Arthur. “I'd like to hear what  he  had  to say.  Presumably  he would know what the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer is. It's always bothered me that we  never  found out.”

“Think of a number,” said the computer, “ any number.”

Arthur told the computer the telephone  number  of  King's  Cross railway  station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, and this might turn out to be it.

The computer injected the number into  the  ship's  reconstituted Improbability Drive.

In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and  Space  tells Matter how to move.

The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted,  and  parked  itself neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber of Law.

The courtroom was an austere place, a large dark chamber, clearly designed for Justice rather than, for instance, for Pleasure. You wouldn't hold a dinner party here - at least,  not  a  successful one. The decor would get your guests down.

The ceilings were high, vaulted and  very  dark.  Shadows  lurked there  with  grim  determination. The panelling for the walls and benches, the cladding of the heavy pillars, all were carved  from the  darkest  and  most  severe  trees  in the fearsome Forest of Arglebard. The massive black Podium of  Justice  which  dominated the  centre of the chamber was a monster of gravity. If a sunbeam had ever managed to slink this far into the  Justice  complex  of Argabuthon  it  would  have turned around and slunk straight back out again.

Arthur and Trillian were the first in,  whilst  Ford  and  Zaphod bravely kept a watch on their rear.

At first it seemed totally dark  and  deserted.  their  footsteps echoed  hollowly  round the chamber. This seemed curious. All the defences were still in position and operative around the  outside of  the  building,  they had run scan checks. Therefore, they had assumed, the truth-telling must still be going on.

But there was nothing.

Then, as their eyes  became  accustomed  to  the  darkness,  they spotted  a  dull red glow in a corner, and behind the glow a live shadow. They swung a torch round on to it.

Prak was lounging on a bench, smoking a listless cigarette.

“Hi,” he said, with a little half-wave. His voice echoed  through the  chamber.  He was a little man with scraggy hair. He sat with his shoulders  hunched  forward  and  his  head  and  knees  kept jiggling. He took a drag of his cigarette.

They stared at him.

“What's going on?” said Trillian.

“Nothing,” said the man and jiggled his shoulders.

Arthur shone his torch full on Prak's face.

“We thought,” he said, “that you were meant  to  be  telling  the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth.”

“Oh, that,” said Prak. “Yeah. I  was.  I  finished.  There's  not nearly  as  much  of  it  as  people imagine. Some of it's pretty funny, though.”

He suddenly exploded in about three seconds of  manical  laughter and  stopped again. he sat there, jiggling his head and knees. He dragged on his cigarette with a strange half-smile.

Ford and Zaphod came forward out of the shadows.

“Tell us about it,” said Ford.

“Oh, I can't remember any of it now,” said Prak.  “I  thought  of writing  some of it down, but first I couldn't find a pencil, and then I thought, why bother?”

There was a long silence, during which they  thought  they  could feel the Universe age a little. Prak stared into the torchlight.

“None of it?” said Arthur at last. “You can remember none of it?”

“No. Except most of the good bits were about  frogs,  I  remember that.”

Suddenly he was hooting with laughter again and stamping his feet on the ground.

“You would not believe  some  of  the  things  about  frogs,”  he gasped.  “Come on let's go and find ourselves a frog. Boy, will I ever see them in a new light!” He leapt to his  feet  and  did  a tiny  little  dance.  Then he stopped and took a long drag at his cigarette.

“Let's find a frog I can laugh at,” he said simply. “Anyway,  who are you guys?”

“We came to find you,” said Trillian,  deliberately  not  keeping the disappointment out of her voice. “My name is Trillian.”

Prak jiggled his head.

“Ford Prefect,” said Ford Prefect with a shrug.

Prak jiggled his head.

“And I,” said Zaphod, when he judged that the  silence  was  once again  deep enough to allow an announcement of such gravity to be tossed in lightly, “am Zaphod Beeblebrox.”

Prak jiggled his head.

“Who's this guy?” said Prak jiggling his shoulder at Arthur,  who was standing silent for a moment, lost in disappointed thoughts.

“Me?” said Arthur. “Oh, my name's Arthur Dent.”

Prak's eyes popped out of his head.

“No kidding?” he yelped. “You are Arthur Dent? The Arthur Dent?”

He staggered backwards, clutching his stomach and convulsed  with fresh paroxysms o laughter.

“Hey, just think of meeting you!” he gasped. “Boy,”  he  shouted, “you are the most ... wow, you just leave the frogs standing!”

he howled and screamed with laughter. He fell over  backwards  on to  the bench. He hollered and yelled in hysterics. He cried with laughter, he kicked his legs in  the  air,  he  beat  his  chest.  Gradually  he  subsided, panting. He looked at them. He looked at Arthur. He fell back again howling with laughter.  Eventually  he fell asleep.

Arthur stood there with his  lips  twitching  whilst  the  others carried Prak comatose on to the ship.

“Before we picked up Prak,” said Arthur, “I was going to leave. I still want to, and I think I should do so as soon as possible.”

The others nodded in silence, a silence which was  only  slightly undermined by the heavily muffled and distant sound of hysterical laughter which came drifting from Prak's cabin  at  the  farthest end of the ship.

“We have questioned him,” continued Arthur,  “or  at  least,  you have  questioned  him  -  I,  as you know, can't go near him - on everything, and he  doesn't  really  seem  to  have  anything  to contribute.  Just the occasional snippet, and things I don't want to hear about frogs.”

The others tried not to smirk.

“Now, I am the first to appreciate a joke,” said Arthur and  then had to wait for the others to stop laughing.

“I am the first ...” he stopped again. This time he  stopped  and listened  to  the  silence. There actually was silence this time, and it had come very suddenly.

Prak was quiet. For days they had  lived  with  constant  manical laughter  ringing  round  the ship, only occasionally relieved by short periods of light giggling and sleep. Arthur's very soul was clenched with paranoia.

This was not the silence of sleep. A buzzer sounded. A glance  at a board told them that the buzzer had been sounded by Prak.

“He's not well,” said Trillian quietly. “The constant laughing is completely wrecking his body.”

Arthur's lips twitched but he said nothing.

“We'd better go and see him,” said Trillian.

Trillian came out of the cabin wearing her serious face.

“He wants you to go in,” she said to Arthur, who was wearing  his glum  and  tight-lipped  one.  He  thrust his hands deep into his dressing-gown pockets and tried to  think  of  something  to  say which  wouldn't  sound  petty.  It seemed terribly unfair, but he couldn't.

“Please,” said Trillian.

He shrugged and went in, taking his glum  and  tight-lipped  face with him, despite the reaction this always provoked from Prak.

He looked down at his tormentor, who was  lying  quietly  on  the bed,  ashen  and wasted. His breathing was very shallow. Ford and Zaphod were standing by the bed looking awkward.

“You wanted to ask me something,” said Prak in a thin  voice  and coughed slightly.

Just the cough made Arthur stiffen, but it passed and subsided.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

Prak shrugged weakly. “'Cos it's true,” he said simply.

Arthur took the point.

“Yes,” he said at last in rather a strained drawl. “I did have  a question.  Or rather, what I actually have is an Answer. I wanted to know what the Question was.”

Prak nodded sympathetically, and Arthur relaxed a little.

“It's ... well, it's a long story,” he said, “but the Question  I would like to know is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know is  that  the  Answer  is  Forty-Two, which is a little aggravating.”

Prak nodded again.

“Forty-Two,” he said. “Yes, that's right.”

He paused. Shadows of thought and memory crossed  his  face  like the shadows of clouds crossing the land.

“I'm afraid,” he said at last, “that the Question and the  Answer are  mutually  exclusive.  Knowledge  of  one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both  can  ever  be known about the same universe.”

He paused again. Disappointment  crept  into  Arthur's  face  and snuggled down into its accustomed place.

“Except,” said Prak, struggling to sort a  thought  out,  “if  it happened,  it  seems  that the Question and the Answer would just cancel each other out and take  the  Universe  with  them,  which would   then   be  replaced  by  something  even  more  bizarrely inexplicable. It is possible that this has already happened,”  he added  with  a  weak  smile,  “but  there  is a certain amount of Uncertainty about it.”

A little giggle brushed through him.

Arthur sat down on a stool.

“Oh well,” he said with resignation, “I  was  just  hoping  there would be some sort of reason.”

“Do you know,” said Prak, “the story of the Reason?”

Arthur said that he didn't, and Prak said that he  knew  that  he didn't.

He told it.

One night, he said, a spaceship appeared in the sky of  a  planet which  had  never  seen one before. The planet was Dalforsas, the ship was this one. It appeared as a  brilliant  new  star  moving silently across the heavens.

Primitive  tribesmen  who  were  sitting  huddled  on  the   Cold Hillsides  looked up from their steaming night-drinks and pointed with trembling fingers, swearing that they had  seen  a  sign,  a sign from their gods which meant that they must now arise at last and go and slay the evil Princes of the Plains.

In the high turrets of their palaces, the Princes of  the  Plains looked  up and saw the shining star, and received it unmistakably as a sign from their gods that they must now go and set about the accursed Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides.

And between them, the Dwellers in the Forest looked up  into  the sky  and  saw  the sigh of the new star, and saw it with fear and apprehension, for though they had never  seen  anything  like  it before,  they  too  knew precisely what it foreshadowed, and they bowed their heads in despair.

They knew that when the rains came, it was a sign.

When the rains departed, it was a sign.

When the winds rose, it was a sign.

When the winds fell, it was a sign.

When in the land there was born at midnight of a full moon a goat with three heads, that was a sign.

When in the land there was born at some time in the  afternoon  a perfectly  normal  cat or pig with no birth complications at all, or even just a child with a retrousse nose, that too would  often be taken as a sign.

So there was no doubt at all that a new star in  the  sky  was  a sign of a particularly spectacular order.

And each new sign signified the same thing - that the Princes  of the  Plains and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides were about to beat the hell out of each other again.

This in itself wouldn't be so bad, except that the Princes of the Plains  and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides always elected to beat the hell out of each other in the Forest, and it was  always the Dwellers in the Forest who came off worst in these exchanges, though as far as they could see it never had anything to do  with them.

And sometimes, after some of the worst  of  these  outrages,  the Dwellers  in  the  Forest  would  send  a messenger to either the leader of the  Princes  of  the  Plains  or  the  leader  of  the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides and demand to know the reason for this intolerable behaviour.

And the leader, whichever one it was, would  take  the  messenger aside  and  explain  the  Reason to him, slowly and carefully and with great attention to the considerable detail involved.

And the terrible thing was, it was a very good one. It  was  very clear,  very  rational,  and  tough. The messenger would hang his head and feel sad and foolish that he had  not  realized  what  a tough and complex place the real world was, and what difficulties and paradoxes had to be embraced if one was to live in it.

“Now do you understand?” the leader would say.

The messenger would nod dumbly.

“And you see these battles have to take place?”

Another dumb nod.

“And why they have to take place in the forest, and why it is  in everybody's  best  interest,  the  Forest Dwellers included, that they should?”

“Er ...”

“In the long run.”

“Er, yes.”

And the messenger did understand the Reason, and he  returned  to his people in the Forest. But as he approached them, as he walked through the Forest and amongst the trees, he found  that  all  he could  remember of the Reason was how terribly clear the argument had seemed. What it actually was he couldn't remember at all.

And this, of course, was a great comfort when next the  Tribesmen and  the  Princes  came hacking and burning their way through the Forest, killing every Forest Dweller in their way.

Prak paused in his story and coughed pathetically.

“I was the messenger,” he said, “after the  battles  precipitated by  the  appearance of your ship, which were particularly savage.  Many of our people died. I thought I could bring the Reason back.  I  went  and was told it by the leader of the Princes, but on the way back it slipped and melted away in my mind like snow  in  the sun. That was many years ago, and much has happened since then.”

He looked up at Arthur and giggled again very gently.

“There is one other thing I can remember  from  the  truth  drug.  Apart  from  the  frogs,  and  that  is God's last message to his creation. Would you like to hear it?”

For a moment they didn't know whether to take him seriously.

“'Strue,” he said. “For real. I mean it.”

His chest heaved weakly and he struggled  for  breath.  His  head lolled slightly.

“I wasn't very impressed with it when I first knew what it  was,” he  said,  “but  now  I  think back to how impressed I was by the Prince's Reason, and how soon afterwards I couldn't recall it  at all,  I  think  it might be a lot more helpful. Would you like to know what it is? Would you?”

They nodded dumbly.

“I bet you would. If you're that interested I suggest you go  and look for it. It is written in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top  of  the  Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains  in   the   land   of Sevorbeupstry  on  the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the sun Zarss in Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma. It is guarded by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob.”

There was a long silence following this announcement,  which  was finally broken by Arthur.

“Sorry, it's where?” he said.

“It is written,” repeated Prak, “in thirty-foot-high  letters  of fire  on  top  of  the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the ...”

“Sorry,” said Arthur again, “which mountains?”

“The Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry  on the planet ...”

“Which land was that? I didn't quite catch it.”

“Sevorbeupstry, on the planet ...”

“Sevorbe-what?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” said Prak and died testily.

In the following days Arthur thought a little about this message, but  in the end he decided that he was not going to allow himself to be drawn by it, and insisted on following his original plan of finding  a  nice little world somewhere to settle down and lead a quiet retired life. Having saved the Universe twice in one day he thought that he could take things a little easier from now on.

They dropped him off on the planet Krikkit, which  was  now  once again   an   idyllic  pastoral  world,  even  if  the  songs  did occasionally get on his nerves.

He spent a lot of time flying.

He learnt to communicate with birds  and  discovered  that  their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a  fair  bit  about berries.  Unfortunately,  he  discovered,  once  you  have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of  it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.

For that reason Arthur eventually gave up the sport and learnt to live  on  the  ground  and  love  it,  despite a lot of the inane chatter he heard down there as well.

One day, he was walking through the fields  humming  a  ravishing tune  he'd  heard recently when a silver spaceship descended from the sky and landed in front of him.

A hatchway opened, a ramp extended, and a tall  grey-green  alien marched out and approached him.

“Arthur Phili ...” it said, then glanced sharply at him and  down at his clipboard. He frowned. He looked up at him again.

“I've done you before haven't I?” he said.