Life, the Universe, and Everything

Douglas Adams

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       For Sally
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        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 ARth-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.

        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 paisleycovered
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.

        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.

        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 LuxO-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."

        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.

        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.

        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.

        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.

        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, swampdwelling
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.

        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 spacetime 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 starbattleship 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.

        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 ultraluxury 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.

        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  laserlit  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 spaceshipstripping 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.

        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 fourdimensionally  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."

        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.

        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.

        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.

        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."

        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.

        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  lifeaffirmation  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.

        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 noneffort 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.

        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.

        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 fourfour, 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 brokenbacked 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."

        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."

        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.

        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.

        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.

        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?"

        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  allfrequencies
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.

        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.

        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.

        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."

        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 paisleycovered
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."

        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.
