corpus5.txt

"I know that," he said, "but there will be one day!  So  we  have
left an open-ended ultimatum."

"What?"

"And blown up a few military installations."

The Captain leaned forward out of his bath.

"Military installations Number Two?" he said.

For a moment the eyes wavered.

"Yes sir, well  potential  military  installations.  Alright  ...
trees."

The moment of uncertainty passed - his eyes flickered like  whips
over his audience.

"And," he roared, "we interrogated a gazelle!"

He flipped his Kill-O-Zap gun smartly under his arm  and  marched
off  through  the pandemonium that had now erupted throughout the
ecstatic crowd. A few steps was all  he  managed  before  he  was
caught up and carried shoulder high for a lap of honour round the
clearing.

Ford sat and idly tapped a couple of stones together.

"So what else have you done?" he inquired after the  celebrations
had died down.

"We have started a culture," said the marketing girl.

"Oh yes?" said Ford.

"Yes. One of our film producers is already making  a  fascinating
documentary about the indigenous cavemen of the area."

"They're not cavemen."

"They look like cavemen."

"Do they live in caves?"

"Well ..."

"They live in huts."

"Perhaps they're having their caves redecorated,"  called  out  a
wag from the crowd.

Ford rounded on him angrily.

"Very funny," he said, "but have you noticed that  they're  dying
out?"

On their journey back,  Ford  and  Arthur  had  come  across  two
derelict  villages  and  the bodies of many natives in the woods,
where they had crept away to die. Those  that  still  lived  were
stricken  and listless, as if they were suffering some disease of
the spirit rather than the body. They moved sluggishly  and  with
an infinite sadness. Their future had been taken away from them.

"Dying out!" repeated Ford. "Do you know what that means?"

"Er ... we shouldn't sell them any life  insurance?"  called  out
the wag again.

Ford ignored him, and appealed to the whole crowd.

"Can you try and understand," he  said,  "that  it's  just  since
we've arrived that they've started dying out!"

"In fact that comes over terribly well in this  film,"  said  the
marketing  girl,  "and just gives it that poignant twist which is
the hallmark of the really great documentary. The producer's very
committed."

"He should be," muttered Ford.

"I gather," said the girl, turning to address the Captain who was
beginning  to nod off, "that he wants to make one about you next,
Captain."

"Oh really?" he said, coming to with  a  start,  "that's  awfully
nice."

"He's got a very strong angle on it,  you  know,  the  burden  of
responsibility, the loneliness of command ..."

The Captain hummed and hahed about this for a moment.

"Well, I wouldn't overstress  that  angle,  you  know,"  he  said
finally, "one's never alone with a rubber duck."

He held the duck aloft and it got an appreciative round from  the
crowd.

All the while, the Management  Consultant  had  been  sitting  in
stony silence, his finger tips pressed to his temples to indicate
that he was waiting and would wait all day if it was necessary.

At this point he decided he would not wait all day after all,  he
would merely pretend that the last half hour hadn't happened.

He rose to his feet.

"If," he said tersely, "we could for a  moment  move  on  to  the
subject of fiscal policy ..."

"Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect, "Fiscal policy!"

The Management Consultant gave him a look that  only  a  lungfish
could have copied.

"Fiscal policy ..." he repeated, "that is what I said."

"How can you have money," demanded Ford, "if none of you actually
produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know."

"If you would allow me to continue ..."

Ford nodded dejectedly.

"Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as
legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich."

Ford  stared  in  disbelief  at  the  crowd  who  were  murmuring
appreciatively  at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves
with which their track suits were stuffed.

"But we have also," continued  the  Management  Consultant,  "run
into  a  small  inflation problem on account of the high level of
leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current  going
rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship's
peanut."

Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The  Management  Consultant
waved them down.

"So in  order  to  obviate  this  problem,"  he  continued,  "and
effectively  revaluate  the  leaf,  we  are  about to embark on a
massive defoliation campaign, and  ...  er,  burn  down  all  the
forests.  I  think  you'll all agree that's a sensible move under
the circumstances."

The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for  a  second  or
two  until  someone  pointed out how much this would increase the
value of the leaves in  their  pockets  whereupon  they  let  out
whoops  of  delight and gave the Management Consultant a standing
ovation.  The  accountants  amongst  them  looked  forward  to  a
profitable Autumn.

"You're all mad," explained Ford Prefect.

"You're absolutely barmy," he suggested.

"You're a bunch of raving nutters," he opined.

The tide of opinion started to turn against him. What had started
out  as  excellent  entertainment  had  now, in the crowd's view,
deteriorated into mere abuse, and since this  abuse  was  in  the
main directed at them they wearied of it.

Sensing this shift in the wind, the marketing girl turned on him.

"Is it perhaps in order," she demanded, "to inquire  what  you've
been  doing  all these months then? You and that other interloper
have been missing since the day we arrived."

"We've been on a journey," said Ford, "We went to  try  and  find
out something about this planet."

"Oh," said the girl archly, "doesn't  sound  very  productive  to
me."

"No? Well have I got news for you, my love.  We  have  discovered
this planet's future."

Ford waited for this statement to have its effect. It didn't have
any. They didn't know what he was talking about.

He continued.

"It doesn't matter a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys what  you  all
choose  to  do  from  now on. Burn down the forests, anything, it
won't make a scrap of difference. Your future history has already
happened.  Two million years you've got and that's it. At the end
of that time your race will be dead, gone and  good  riddance  to
you. Remember that, two million years!"

The crowd muttered to itself in annoyance. People as rich as they
had  suddenly  become shouldn't be obliged to listen to this sort
of gibberish. Perhaps they could tip the fellow a leaf or two and
he would go away.

They didn't need to bother. Ford was already stalking out of  the
clearing,  pausing  only  to shake his head at Number Two who was
already firing his Kill-O-Zap gun into some neighbouring trees.

He turned back once.

"Two million years!" he said and laughed.

"Well," said the Captain with a soothing smile, "still time for a
few  more baths. Could someone pass me the sponge? I just dropped
it over the side."




A mile or so away through the wood, Arthur Dent  was  too  busily
engrossed with what he was doing to hear Ford Prefect approach.

What he was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on
a  wide  flat  piece  of rock he had scratched out the shape of a
large square, subdivided into one hundred and sixty-nine  smaller
squares, thirteen to a side.

Furthermore he had collected together a pile of smallish flattish
stones  and  scratched  the shape of a letter on to each. Sitting
morosely round the rock were a  couple  of  the  surviving  local
native  men  whom Arthur Dent was trying to introduce the curious
concept embodied in these stones.

So far they had not done well. They had attempted to eat some  of
them,  bury  others  and  throw the rest of them away. Arthur had
finally encouraged one of them to lay a couple of stones  on  the
board  he  had  scratched  out, which was not even as far as he'd
managed to get the day before. Along with the rapid deterioration
in   the  morale  of  these  creatures,  there  seemed  to  be  a
corresponding deterioration in their actual intelligence.

In an attempt to egg them along,  Arthur  set  out  a  number  of
letters  on  the  board  himself, and then tried to encourage the
natives to add some more themselves.

It was not going well.

Ford watched quietly from beside a nearby tree.

"No," said Arthur to one of the natives  who  had  just  shuffled
some  of  the  letters  round  in  a fit of abysmal dejection, "Q
scores ten you see, and it's on a triple word score, so ... look,
I've  explained the rules to you ... no no, look please, put down
that  jawbone  ...  alright,  we'll  start  again.  And  try   to
concentrate this time."

Ford leaned his elbow against the tree and his hand  against  his
head.

"What are you doing, Arthur?" he asked quietly.

Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a feeling that all
this  might  look  slightly  foolish. All he knew was that it had
worked like a dream on him when he was a chid.  But  things  were
different then, or rather would be.

"I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble," he said.

"They're not cavemen," said Ford.

"They look like cavemen."

Ford let it pass.
"I see," he said.

"It's uphill work," said Arthur wearily, "the only word they know
is grunt and they can't spell it."

He sighed and sat back.

"What's that supposed to achieve?" asked Ford.

"We've got to encourage them to evolve! To develop!" Arthur burst
out  angrily.  He  hoped  that  the weary sigh and then the anger
might do  something  to  counteract  the  overriding  feeling  of
foolishness  from which he was currently suffering. It didn't. He
jumped to his feet.

"Can you imagine what a world would be like descended from  those
... cretins we arrived with?" he said.

"Imagine?" said Ford, rising his  eyebrows.  "We  don't  have  to
imagine. We've seen it."

"But ..." Arthur waved his arms about hopelessly.

"We've seen it," said Ford, "there's no escape."

Arthur kicked at a stone.

"Did you tell them what we've discovered?" he asked.

"Hmmmm?" said Ford, not really concentrating.

"Norway,"  said  Arthur,  "Slartibartfast's  signature   in   the
glacier. Did you tell them?"

"What's the point?" said Ford, "What would it mean to them?"

"Mean?" said Arthur, "Mean?  You  know  perfectly  well  what  it
means. It means that this planet is the Earth! It's my home! It's
where I was born!"

"Was?" said Ford.

"Alright, will be."

"Yes, in two million years' time. Why don't you tell  them  that?
Go  and  say to them, `Excuse me, I'd just like to point out that
in two million years' time I will be born just a few  miles  from
here.'  See  what  they  say. They'll chase you up a tree and set
fire to it."

Arthur absorbed this unhappily.

"Face it," said Ford, "those zeebs over there are your ancestors,
not these poor creatures here."

He went  over  to  where  the  apemen  creatures  were  rummaging
listlessly with the stone letters. He shook his head.
"Put the Scrabble away, Arthur," he  said,  "it  won't  save  the
human  race,  because this lot aren't going to be the human race.
The human race is currently sitting round a  rock  on  the  other
side of this hill making documentaries about themselves."

Arthur winced.

"There must be something we can do," he said. A terrible sense of
desolation  thrilled  through his body that he should be here, on
the Earth, the Earth which had lost its future  in  a  horrifying
arbitrary  catastrophe  and which now seemed set to lose its past
as well.

"No," said Ford, "there's nothing we can do. This doesn't  change
the  history  of  the  Earth, you see, this is the history of the
Earth. Like it or leave it, the Golgafrinchans are the people you
are  descended  from.  in two million years they get destroyed by
the Vogons. History is  never  altered  you  see,  it  just  fits
together like a jigsaw. Funny old thing, life, isn't it?"

He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant pivet bush
where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and
didn't stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which  choked
on  one  of  its  bones  and  died  on the bank of a stream which
subsequently washed it away.

During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his  pride  and
struck  up  a  relationship  with a girl who had been a personnel
officer on Golgafrincham, and he  was  terribly  upset  when  she
suddenly  passed  away  as a result of drinking water from a pool
that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only  moral
it  is  possible to draw from this story is that one should never
throw the letter Q into a pivet bush, but unfortunately there are
times when it is unavoidable.

Like most of the really crucial things in  life,  this  chain  of
events  was completely invisible to Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent.
They were looking sadly at one of the  natives  morosely  pushing
the other letters around.

"Poor bloody caveman," said Arthur.

"They're not ..."

"What?"

"Oh never mind."

The wretched creature let out a pathetic howling noise and banged
on the rock.

"It's all been a bit of waste of time for them, hasn't it?"  said
Arthur.

"Uh uh urghhhhh," muttered the native  and  banged  on  the  rock
again.

"They've been outevolved by telephone sanitizers."
"Urgh, gr gr, gruh!" insisted the native, continuing to  bang  on
the rock.

"Why does he keep banging on the rock?" said Arthur.

"I think he probably wants you to Scrabble with him again,"  said
Ford, "he's pointing at the letters."

"Probably spelt crzjgrdwldiwdc again, poor  bastard.  I  keep  on
telling him there's only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc."

The native banged on the rock again.

They looked over his shoulder.

Their eyes popped.

There amongst the jumble of letters were eight that had been laid
out in a clear straight line.

They spelt two words.

The words were these:

"Forty-Two."

"Grrrurgh guh guh," explained the native. He  swept  the  letters
angrily  away  and  went and mooched under a nearby tree with his
colleague.

Ford and Arthur stared at him. Then they stared at each other.

"Did that say what I thought it said?" they  both  said  to  each
other.

"Yes," they both said.

"Forty-two," said Arthur.

"Forty-two," said Ford.

Arthur ran over to the two natives.

"What are you trying to tell us?" he shouted. "What's it supposed
to mean?"

One of them rolled over on the ground, kicked his legs up in  the
air, rolled over again and went to sleep.

The other bounded up the tree and threw horse chestnuts  at  Ford
Prefect.  Whatever  it was they had to say, they had already said
it.

"You know what this means," said Ford.

"Not entirely."

"Forty-two is the number Deep Thought gave as being the  Ultimate
Answer."
"Yes."

And the Earth is the computer Deep Thought designed and built  to
calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer."

"So we are led to believe."

"And organic life was part of the computer matrix."

"If you say so."

"I do say so. That means that these natives, these apemen are  an
integral  part  of  the  computer  program,  and  that we and the
Golgafrinchans are not."

"But the  cavemen  are  dying  out  and  the  Golgafrinchans  are
obviously set to replace them."

"Exactly. So do you see what this means?"

"What?"

"Cock up," said Ford Prefect.

Arthur looked around him.

"This planet is having a pretty bloody time of it," he said.

Ford puzzled for a moment.

"Still, something must have come out of it,"  he  said  at  last,
"because  Marvin  said  he could see the Question printed in your
brain wave patterns."

"But ..."

"Probably the wrong one, or a distortion of  the  right  one.  It
might  give us a clue though if we could find it. I don't see how
we can though."

They moped about for a bit. Arthur sat on the ground and  started
pulling  up bits of grass, but found that it wasn't an occupation
he could get deeply  engrossed  in.  It  wasn't  grass  he  could
believe  in, the trees seemed pointless, the rolling hills seemed
to be rolling to nowhere and the future seemed just a  tunnel  to
be crawled through.

Ford fiddled with his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It  was  silent.  He
sighed and put it away.

Arthur picked up one of the  letter  stones  from  his  home-made
Scrabble  set.  It  was a T. He sighed and out it down again. The
letter he put down next to it was an I. That spelt IT. He  tossed
another couple of letters next to them They were an S and an H as
it  happened.  By  a  curious  coincidence  the  resulting   word
perfectly  expressed the way Arthur was feeling about things just
then.  He  stared  at  it  for  a  moment.  He  hadn't  done   it
deliberately,  it  was just a random chance. His brain got slowly
into first gear.

"Ford," he said suddenly, "look, if that Question is  printed  in
my  brain  wave  patterns  but I'm not consciously aware of it it
must be somewhere in my unconscious."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"There might be  a  way  of  bringing  that  unconscious  pattern
forward."

"Oh yes?"

"Yes, by introducing some random element that can  be  shaped  by
that pattern."

"Like how?"

"Like by pulling Scrabble letters out of a bag blindfolded."

Ford leapt to his feet.

"Brilliant!" he said. He tugged his towel out of his satchel  and
with a few deft knots transformed it into a bag.

"Totally mad," he said, "utter nonsense. But we'll do it  because
it's brilliant nonsense. Come on, come on."

The sun passed respectfully behind  a  cloud.  A  few  small  sad
raindrops fell.

They piled together all the remaining letters  and  dropped  them
into the bag. They shook them up.

"Right," said Ford, "close your eyes. Pull them out. Come on come
on, come on."

Arthur closed his eyes and plunged his hand into the towelful  of
stones. He jiggled them about, pulled out four and handed them to
Ford. Ford laid them along the ground in the order he got them.

"W," said Ford, "H, A, T ... What!"

He blinked.

"I think it's working!" he said.

Arthur pushed three more at him.

"D, O, Y ... Doy. Oh perhaps it isn't working," said Ford.

"Here's the next three."

"O, U, G ... Doyoug ... It's not making sense I'm afraid."

Arthur pulled another two from the bag. Ford put them in place.

"E, T, doyouget ... Do you get!" shouted Ford,  "it  is  working!
This is amazing, it really is working!"
"More here." Arthur was throwing them out feverishly as  fast  as
he could go.

"I, F," said Ford, "Y, O, U, ... M, U, L, T, I, P, L, Y, ... What
do  you  get if you multiply, ... S, I, X, ... six, B, Y, by, six
by ... what do you get if you multiply six by ... N, I, N, E, ...
six by nine ..." He paused. "Come on, where's the next one?"

"Er, that's the lot," said Arthur, "that's all there were."

He sat back, nonplussed.

He rooted around again in the knotted up towel but there were  no
more letters.

"You mean that's it?" said Ford.

"That's it."

"Six by nine. Forty-two."

"That's it. That's all there is."




The sun came out and beamed cheerfully at them. A  bird  sang.  A
warm  breeze wafted through the trees and lifted the heads of the
flowers, carrying their scent away through the woods.  An  insect
droned  past  on  its way to do whatever it is that insects do in
the late afternoon. The sound of voices lilted through the  trees
followed  a  moment later by two girls who stopped in surprise at
the sight of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent apparently lying on the
ground in agony, but in fact rocking with noiseless laughter.

"No, don't go," called Ford Prefect between gasps, "we'll be with
you in a moment."

"What's the matter?" asked one of the girls. She was  the  taller
and  slimmer  of  the two. On Golgafrincham she had been a junior
personnel officer, but hadn't liked it much.

Ford pulled himself together.

"Excuse  me,"  he  said,  "hello.  My  friend  and  I  were  just
contemplating the meaning of life. Frivolous exercise."

"Oh it's you," said the girl, "you made a bit of a  spectacle  of
yourself  this  afternoon. You were quite funny to begin with but
you did bang on a bit."

"Did I? Oh yes."

"Yes, what was all that for?" asked the  other  girl,  a  shorter
round-faced  girl  who  had  been  an  art  director  for a small
advertising company on Golgafrincham. Whatever the privations  of
this  world  were,  she  went  to  sleep  every  night profoundly
grateful for the fact that  whatever  she  had  to  face  in  the
morning  it wouldn't be a hundred almost identical photographs of
moodily lit tubes of toothpaste.

"For? For nothing. Nothing's for  anything,"  said  Ford  Prefect
happily.  "Come  and  join  us. I"m Ford, this is Arthur. We were
just about to do nothing at all for a while but it can wait."

The girls looked at them doubtfully.

"I'm Agda," said the tall one, "this is Mella."

"Hello Agda, hello Mella," said Ford.

"Do you talk at all?" said Mella to Arthur.

"Oh, eventually," said Arthur with a smile, "but not as  much  as
Ford."

"Good."

There was a slight pause.

"What did you mean," asked Agda, "about only having  two  million
years? I couldn't make sense of what you were saying."

"Oh that," said Ford, "it doesn't matter."

"It's just that the world gets  demolished  to  make  way  for  a
hyperspace  bypass,"  said  Arthur  with a shrug, "but that's two
million years away, and anyway it's just Vogons doing what Vogons
do."

"Vogons?" said Mella.

"Yes, you wouldn't know them."

"Where'd you get this idea from?"

"It really doesn't matter. It's just like a dream from the  past,
or the future." Arthur smiled and looked away.

"Does it worry you that you don't talk any kind of sense?"  asked
Agda.

"Listen, forget it,"  said  Ford,  "forget  all  of  it.  Nothing
matters. Look, it's a beautiful day, enjoy it. The sun, the green
of the hills, the river down in the valley, the burning trees."

"Even if it's only a dream, it's a pretty  horrible  idea,"  said
Mella, "destroying a world just to make a bypass."

"Oh, I've heard of worse," said Ford, "I read of one  planet  off
in  the  seventh  dimension  that got used as a ball in a game of
intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted  straight  into  a  black
hole. Killed ten billion people."

"That's mad," said Mella.

"Yes, only scored thirty points too."
Agda and Mella exchanged glances.

"Look," said Agda, "there's a party after the  committee  meeting
tonight. You can come along if you like."

"Yeah, OK," said Ford.

"I'd like to," said Arthur.

Many hours later Arthur and Mella sat and watched the  moon  rise
over the dull red glow of the trees.

"That story about the world being destroyed ..." began Mella.

"In two million years, yes."

"You say it as if you really think it's true."

"Yes, I think it is. I think I was there."

She shook her head in puzzlement.

"You're very strange," she said.

"No, I'm very ordinary," said  Arthur,  "but  some  very  strange
things  have happened to me. You could say I'm more differed from
than differing."

"And that other world your friend talked about, the one that  got
pushed into a black hole."

"Ah, that I don't know about. It sounds like something  from  the
book."

"What book?"

Arthur paused.

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," he said at last.

"What's that?"

"Oh, just something I threw into the river this evening. I  don't
think I'll be wanting it any more," said Arthur Dent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except just once.

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

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

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

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

A ramp extended itself.

Light streamed out.

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

"You're a jerk, Dent," it said simply.

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

Arthur boggled at it.

It gazed levelly at him.

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

"Whh ...?" he said.

"Bu ... hu ... uh ..." he added.

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

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

"Arthur Dent?" it said.

Arthur nodded helplessly.

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

"Er ... er ... yes ... er ... er," confirmed Arthur.

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

"Er ..."

The creature nodded to itself, made a peculiar alien tick on  its
clipboard and turned briskly back towards the ship.
"Er ..." said Arthur desperately, "er ..."

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

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

"Wait a minute!" he called. "What is this? What? Wait a minute!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He would insult the Universe.

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

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

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

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

"Computer," he said.

"Here," yipped the computer.

"Where next?"

"Computing that."

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

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

The computer beeped tunelessly to indicate that it  had  finished
its calculations.
"Folfanga," it said. It beeped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The computer beeped.

"Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box," it said, and beeped.

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

"No."

"Uh."

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

"Wake me for the second reel."

The computer beeped.

"Sleep well," it said.

The ship fled on through the night.

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

"I will go mad!" he announced.

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

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

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

"You see," said Ford, "- ..."

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

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

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

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

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

"I thought you must be dead ..." he said simply.

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

Arthur cleared his throat, and then did it again.
"Where," he said, "did you ...?"

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

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

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

"Carry on," he said levelly.

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

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

"I went to Africa," said Ford.

"Yes?"

"Yes."

"What was that like?"

"And this is your cave is it?" said Ford.

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

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

Arthur didn't bother to reply.

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

He gazed thoughtfully into the distance.

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

"Oh yes," said Arthur, warily.

"Yes," Ford assured him. "I won't disturb you  with  the  details
because they would -"

"What?"

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

"Tell me," said Arthur.

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

"The ...?"

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

"Yes. I remember throwing it in the river."

"Yes," said Ford, "but I fished it out."

"You didn't tell me."

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

"Fair enough," admitted Arthur. "It says?"

"What?"

"The Guide says?"

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

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

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

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

"Kings?" suggested Ford.

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

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

"Shake," prompted Ford.

Arthur did, nervously at first, as if it might turn out to  be  a
fish.  Then  he  grasped  it  vigorously  with  both  hands in an
overwhelming flood of relief. He shook it and shook it.
After a while Ford found it necessary to disengage. They  climbed
to  the  top  of  a nearby outcrop of rock and surveyed the scene
around them.

"What happened to the Golgafrinchans?" asked Ford.

Arthur shrugged.

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

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

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

"Where? How?" said Arthur.

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

He lowered his voice to a whisper.

"I have detected," he said, "disturbances in the wash."

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

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

"The wash?" said Arthur.

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

Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.

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

"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."

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

"What?" said Ford.

"Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly?"

Ford looked angrily at him.

"Will you listen?" he snapped.
"I have been listening," said Arthur,  "but  I'm  not  sure  it's
helped."

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

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

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

"... in the fabric of space-time," he said.

"Ah, that," said Arthur.

"Yes, that," confirmed Ford.

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

"And it's done what?" said Arthur.

"It," said Ford, "has developed pools of instability."

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

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

"Good," said Arthur.

"See?" said Ford.

"No," said Arthur.

There was a quiet pause.

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

"Arthur," said Ford.

"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.

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

"Ah, well I'm not sure I believe that."

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

"Flat battery?" said Arthur.

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

"Where?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day  was  for
once  working  out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes
ago he had decided he would  go  mad,  and  now  he  was  already
chasing  a  Chesterfield  sofa  across  the fields of prehistoric
Earth.
The sofa bobbed this way and that and seemed simultaneously to be
as solid as the trees as it drifted past some of them and hazy as
a billowing dream as it floated like a ghost through others.

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




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.




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

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

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

"What was that?" hissed Arthur.

"Something red," hissed Ford back at him.

"Where are we?"

"Er, somewhere green."

"Shapes," muttered Arthur. "I need shapes."

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

"This your sofa?" said a voice.
"What was that?" whispered Ford.

Arthur looked up.

"Something blue," he said.

"Shape?" said Ford.

Arthur looked again.

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

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

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

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

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

"What did you say?" said the startled shape.

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

"It is a policeman," he said, "What do we do?"

Ford shrugged.

"What do you want to do?" he said.

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

Ford shrugged again, and obliged.

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

Arthur got to his feet.

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

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

"So where did I get these clothes from?" he howled.
He collapsed and lay twitching on the grass.

Ford shook his head.

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

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

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

"Edgbaston, 1932?"

"Ah, now what happened then ..."

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

There was a pause while the first commentator considered this.

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

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

"Ah, did he?"

"Yes. An alligator, I think, of some description."

"Ah. And had anyone else noticed it?"

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

"And what happened to the man?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur sat up.

"Where am I?" he said.

"Lord's Cricket Ground," said Ford.

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

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

"How're you feeling?" said Ford.

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

"I'm home," he repeated, "home. It's  England,  it's  today,  the
nightmare is over." He opened his eyes again and smiled serenely.
"I'm where I belong," he said in an emotional whisper.
"There are two things I fell which I should tell you," said Ford,
tossing a copy of the Guardian over the table at him.

"I'm home," said Arthur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur was shaking.

"Perhaps," he said, "I should ..."

"No," said Ford sharply.

"What?" said Arthur.

"Don't try and phone yourself up at home."

"How did you know ...?"

Ford shrugged.

"But why not?" said Arthur.

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

"But ..."

"Look," said Ford. He picked up an imaginary phone and dialled an
imaginary dial.
"Hello?" he said into the imaginary mouthpiece. "Is  that  Arthur
Dent?  Ah,  hello,  yes. This is Arthur Dent speaking. Don't hang
up."

He looked at the imaginary mouthpiece in disappointment.

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

"This is not my first temporal anomaly," he added.

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

"So we're not home and dry," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You all right?" said the boy.

"No," said Arthur.

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

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

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

"Dent," said Arthur, "Arthur Dent."

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

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

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

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

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

"A what?" he said.

"An SEP."

"An S ...?"

"... EP."

"And what's that?"

"Somebody Else's Problem."

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

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

"Where?" said Arthur.

"There!" said Ford.

"I see," said Arthur, who didn't.

"You do?" said Ford.

"What?" said Arthur.

"Can you see," said Ford patiently, "the SEP?"

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

"That's right."

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

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

"You do?"
"Yes."

"What," said Arthur, "does it look like?"

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

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

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

"Ah," said Arthur, "then that's why ..."

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

"... you've been jumping up and ..."

"Yes."

"... down, and blinking ..."

"Yes."

"... and ..."

"I think you've got the message."

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

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

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

"W ... w ... w ... w ..." his mouth said.

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

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

"You are English, aren't you?" said the apparition.
"W ... w ... w ... w ... yes" said Arthur.

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, pottering, pottering," said the old man gravely.

"That your ship? Can you give us a lift anywhere?"

"Patience, patience," the old man admonished.

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

"I know that," said Slartibartfast.

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

"The point is taken."

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

"I do."

"Then it's your ship."

"It is."

"I suppose." Ford turned away sharply at this point.

"Hello, Slartibartfast," said Arthur at last.

"Hello, Earthman," said Slartibartfast.

"After all," said Ford, "we can only die once."

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

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

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

"Patience," said Slartibartfast again. "Great things are afoot."

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

"They were," said Slartibartfast.

"Yes, that's true," admitted Arthur.

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

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

"He said to meet him at his ship," said Arthur.

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

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

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

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

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

They were robots, white robots.

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

"Hello," said Arthur, "something seems to be happening."

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

Smoke and flame billowed from the pitch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur shook his head.

"`They've ...' something or other," he said.

"They've table warble farble!" shouted Slartibartfast again.

Ford and Arthur shook their heads at each other.

"It sounds urgent," said Arthur. He stopped and shouted.

"What?"

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

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

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

"Strange thing to want to tell us," snapped Ford.

"Strange thing to take."

"Strange ship."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I fancy somewhere sunny," said Ford.

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

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

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

"Arthur Philip Deodat?" asked the figure.

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

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




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.




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.




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.




"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.




Another world, another day, another dawn.

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing moved.

There was silence.

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

Nothing moved.

Again, silence.
Nothing moved.

Silence.

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

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

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

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

"Hello, robot," said the mattress.

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

"Happy?" said the mattress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvin paused again in his weary circular plod.

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

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

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

Marvin plodded.

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

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

Stomp, stomp, he went.

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

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

The mattress globbered again.

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

"Because my leg is stuck," said Marvin simply.

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

"You are right," said Marvin, "it is."

"Voon," said the mattress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mattress did.

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

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

"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"

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

It gupped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He trudged savagely for a few seconds.

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

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

"A bridge?" quirruled the mattress. "Here in the swamp?"

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

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

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

"Did it glitter?" enthused the mattress.

"It glittered."

"Did it span the miles majestically?"

"It spanned the miles majestically."

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

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

"I want to hear your speech," said the mattress.

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

Marvin paused, remembering the moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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




The body of Arthur Dent span.

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

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

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

"These, then,"  said  the  figure,  speaking  from  an  immensely
comfortable   chair,   "were   the  Krikkit  Wars,  the  greatest
devastation  ever  visited  upon  our  Galaxy.  What   you   have
experienced ..."

Slartibartfast floated past, waving.

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

"... is what billions of billions of innocent ..."

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

"... people, creatures, your fellow beings ..."

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

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

The music was going bananas with immensity at this point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slartibartfast floated past again at this moment.

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

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

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

"You get the gist?" said Slartibartfast.

"I'm astonished," said Arthur, "and bewildered."

"I was asleep," said Ford, who floated into view at  this  point.
"Did I miss anything?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And suddenly it stopped.

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

The sun was setting.

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

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

The sun had nearly set.

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

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

"I will tell you about it," he said quietly.

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

He stopped and looked up.

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

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

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

He stared up into the sky.

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




Stomp stomp.

Whirrr.

"Pleased to be of service."

"Shut up."

"Thank you."

Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp.

Whirrr.

"Thank you for making a simple door very happy."

"Hope your diodes rot."

"Thank you. Have a nice day."

Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

Whirrr.

"It is my pleasure to open for you ..."

"Zark off."

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

"I said zark off."

"Thank you for listening to this message."

Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

"Wop."

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

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

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

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

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

It had been a difficult day - of course.

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

And he had, of course, been slightly drunk.

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

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

He listened but could hear nothing.

All there had been was the "wop".

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

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

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

In fact he'd always more or less assumed that he had  one  as  he
had  a  full  complement  of  everything  else, and indeed two of
somethings, but suddenly actually to encounter the thing  lurking
there deep within him had giving him a severe jolt.
And then to discover (this was the second shock) that  it  wasn't
the  totally wonderful object which he felt a man in his position
had a natural right to expect had jolted him again.

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

"Freedom," he said aloud.

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

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

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

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

"You're drinking too much," said Trillian.

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

"Excitement and adventure and really wild things," he muttered.

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

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

"Wow," he said. He had another drink.

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

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

"You've still finished it."

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

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

"Are they?"

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

Trillian raised her eyebrows.

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

He paused.

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

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

"Go to it," it said, "and good luck."

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

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

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

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

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

"How are you?" she said over the general intercom.

"Fine," he said brightly, "terribly well."

"Where are you?"

"In the bathroom."

"What are you doing?"

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

"Heigh ho," said Eddie the Computer.

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

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

"Probably not," replied Zaphod from wherever he was.

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

"Whatever you think, I think," said Zaphod.

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

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

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

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

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

The first part is easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration.

Bob and float, float and bob.

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

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

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

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

Waft higher and higher.

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

Do not wave at anybody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went into a low orbit.

There lay the silverwhite beauty of Allosimanius  Syneca  beneath
them.

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

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

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

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

"Zark off," said Zaphod.

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

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

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

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

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

After a while he began to turn down the lights. There was nothing
to see. Nothing was about to happen.
Lying in bed one night - and night was now  virtually  continuous
on  the ship - he decided to pull himself together, to get things
into some kind of perspective. He sat up sharply and  started  to
pull  clothes  on.  He  decided that there must be someone in the
Universe feeling  more  wretched,  miserable  and  forsaken  than
himself, and he determined to set out and find him.

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

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

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

"Computer?" he hissed.

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

"Is there someone on this ship?"

"Mmmmm," said the computer.

"Who is it?"

Mmmmm mmm mmmmm," said the computer.

"What?"

"Mmmmm mmmm mm mmmmmmmm."

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

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

"Computer," he hissed again.

"Mmmmm?"

"When I ungag you ..."

"Mmmmm."

"Remind me to punch myself in the mouth."

"Mmmmm mmm?"

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

"It is?"

"Mmmm."

"You didn't just go `mmmm' twice?"

"Mmmm mmmm."

"Hmmmm."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"OK."

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

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

"I understand."

"OK," said Zaphod, tensing himself, "open now."

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

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

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

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

He stared at them in shock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"... haven't you?" he added.

"Yes," replied the robot."

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

Silence.

"Robots," said Zaphod, "what are you robots doing here?"

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

Zaphod nodded. He waggled his gun to invite further  elaboration.
The robot seemed to understand this.

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

Zaphod nodded again. He waggled his gun again.

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

"What are you talking about?" he said.

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

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

"No you won't."

"We will," stated the robot.

"No you won't. It makes my ship work."

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

"You will not," said Zaphod.

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

"Oh," said Zaphod, startled. "Can I come?"

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

"Oh yeah?" said Zaphod, waggling his gun.

"Yes," said the robot, and they shot him.

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




"Shhh," said Slartibartfast. "Listen and watch."

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

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

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

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

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

"The Masters of Krikkit," breathed Slartibartfast  in  sepulchral
tones.

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

"What?" he said.

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

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

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

Then, this Krikkit angle was a tough one, too.  He  hadn't  quite
fathomed the connection between what he knew as cricket, and what
...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Me?" said Ford. "No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He moved on again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ford and Arthur decided just to relax and be harrowed.

"Why not," said Ford, "go mad?"

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

Pow, they took off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.

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

They flew out of the cloud.

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

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

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

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




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

"Yes," said Arthur.

"Yes," said Ford.

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

Slartibartfast glanced at him gravely.

"Toy with it," he said, "toy with it."

He demonstrated with his own piece.

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

"Overnight,"  said  Slartibartfast,  "the  whole  population   of
Krikkit   was   transformed   from  being  charming,  delightful,
intelligent ..."

"... if whimsical ..." interpolated Arthur.

"...  ordinary  people,"  said  Slartibartfast,  "into  charming,
delightful, intelligent ..."

"... whimsical ..."

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

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

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

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

"Where are we going?" said Ford.

"Back   to   the   Room   of   Informational   Illusions,"   said
Slartibartfast,   rising   and   patting   his   mouth  with  the
mathematical representation of a paper napkin,  "for  the  second
half."




"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.




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.




"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.




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."




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".