Chapter 20
Arthur lay floundering in pain on a piece of ripped and dismembered reinforced concrete, flicked at by wisps of passing cloud and confused by the sounds of flabby merrymaking somewhere indistinctly behind him.
There was a sound he couldn't immediately identify, partly because he didn't know the tune "I Left My Leg in Jaglan Beta" and partly because the band playing it was very tired, and some members of it were playing in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed pi r2 , each according to the amount of sleep he'd managed to grab recently.
He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting. He seemed to have sprained his wrist. His back, too, was hurting, but he soon satisfied himself that he was not badly hurt, but just bruised and a little shaken, as who wouldn't be. He couldn't understand what a building would be doing flying through the clouds.
On the other hand, he would have been a little hard pressed to come up with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so he decided that he and the building were just going to have to accept each other. He looked up from where he was lying. A wall of pale but stained stone slabs rose up behind him, the building proper. He seemed to be stretched out on some sort of ledge or lip that extended outward for about three or four feet all the way around. It was a hunk of the ground in which the party building had had its foundations, and which it had taken along with itself to keep itself bound together at the bottom end.
Nervously, he stood up and suddenly, looking out over the edge, he felt nauseous with vertigo. He pressed himself back against the wall, wet with mist and sweat. His head was swimming freestyle, but his stomach was doing the butterfly.
Even though he had got up here under his own power, he could now not even bear to contemplate the hideous drop in front of him. He was not about to try his luck jumping. He was not about to move an inch closer to the edge.
Clutching his tote bag he edged along the wall, hoping to find a doorway in. The solid weight of the can of olive oil was a great reassurance to him.
He was edging in the direction of the nearest corner, in the hope that the wall around the corner might offer more in the way of entrances than this one, which offered none.
The unsteadiness of the building's flight made him feel sick with fear, and, after a short time, he took the towel from out of his bag, and did something with it which once again justified its supreme position in the list of useful things to take with you when you hitchhike round the Galaxy -- he put it over his head so he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.
His feet edged along the ground. His outstretched hand edged along the wall.
Finally he came to the corner, and as his hand rounded the corner, it encountered something that gave him such a shock he nearly fell off. It was another hand.
The two hands gripped each other.
He desperately wanted to use his other hand to pull the towel away from his eyes, but it was holding the bag with the olive oil, the retsina and the postcards of Santorini, and he very much didn't want to put it down.
He experienced one of those "self" moments, one of those moments when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think "Who am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?" He whimpered very slightly.
He tried to free his hand, but he couldn't. The other hand was holding his tightly. He had no recourse but to edge onward toward the corner. He leaned around it and shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the towel. This seemed to provoke a sharp cry of some unfathomable emotion from the owner of the other hand.
The towel was whipped from his head and he found his eyes peering into those of Ford Prefect. Beyond him stood Slartibartfast, and beyond them he could clearly see a porchway and a large closed door.
They were both pressed back against the wall, eyes wild with terror as they stared out into the thick blind cloud around them, and tried to resist the lurching and swaying of the building.
"Where the zarking photon have you been?" hissed Ford, panic stricken.
"Er, well," stuttered Arthur, not really knowing how to sum it all up that briefly, "here and there. What are you doing here?"
Ford turned his wild eyes on Arthur again.
"They won't let us in without a bottle," he hissed.
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:47 pm
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:47 pm
Chapter 21
The first thing Arthur noticed as they entered into the thick of the party, apart from the noise, the suffocating heat, the wild profusion of colors that protruded dimly through the atmosphere of heady smoke, the carpets thick with ground glass, ash and guacamole droppings, and the small group of pterodactyl-like creatures in Lurex who descended on his cherished bottle of retsina, squawking, " A new pleasure, a new pleasure," was Trillian being chatted up by a Thunder God.
"Didn't I see you at Milliways?" he was saying.
"Were you the one with the hammer?"
"Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more fraught."
Squeals of some hideous pleasure rang around the room, the outer dimensions of which were invisible through the heaving throng of happy noisy creatures, cheerfully yelling at each other things that nobody could hear and occasionally having crises.
"Seems fun," said Trillian. "What did you say, Arthur?"
"I said, how the hell did you get here?"
"I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe. Have you met Thor? He makes thunder."
"Hello," said Arthur. "I expect that must be very interesting."
"Hi," said Thor, "it is. Have you got a drink?"
"Er, no actually ..."
"Then why don't you go and get one?"
"See you later, Arthur," said Trillian.
Something jogged Arthur's mind, and he looked around huntedly.
"Zaphod isn't here, is he?" he said.
"See you," said Trillian firmly, "later."
Thor glared at him with hard coal-black eyes, his beard bristling. What little light there was in the place mustered its forces briefly to glint menacingly off the horns on his helmet.
He took Trillian's elbow in his extremely large hand and the muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of Volkswagens parking.
He led her away.
"One of the interesting things about being immortal," he said, "is ..."
"One of the interesting things about space," Arthur heard Slartibartfast saying to a large and voluminous creature who looked like someone losing a fight with a pink comforter and was gazing raptly at the old man's deep eyes and silver beard, "is how dull it is."
"Dull?" said the creature, and blinked her rather wrinkled and bloodshot eyes.
"Yes," said Slartibartfast, "staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there's so much of it and so little in it. Would you like me to quote you some statistics?"
"Er, well ..."
"Please, I would like to. They, too, are quite sensationally dull."
"I'll come back and hear them in a moment," she said, patted him on the arm, lifted up her skirts like a Hovercraft and moved off into the heaving crowd.
"I thought she'd never go," growled the old man. "Come, Earth man ..."
"Arthur."
"We must find the Silver Bail, it is here somewhere."
"Can't we just relax a little," Arthur said. "I've had a tough day. Trillian's here, incidentally, she didn't say how; it probably doesn't matter."
"Think of the danger to the Universe ..."
"The Universe," said Arthur, "is big enough and old enough to look after itself for half an hour. All right," he added, in response to Slartibartfast's increasing agitation, "I'll wander round and see if anybody's seen it."
"Good, good," said Slartibartfast, "good." He plunged into the crowd himself, and was told to relax by everybody he passed.
"Have you seen a bail anywhere?" said Arthur to a little man who seemed to be standing eagerly waiting to listen to somebody. "It's made of silver, vitally important for the future safety of the Universe, and about this long."
"No," said the enthusiastically wizened little man, "but do have a drink and tell me all about it."
Ford Prefect writhed past, dancing a wild, frenetic and not entirely unobscene dance with someone who looked as if she were wearing Sydney Opera House on her head. He was yelling a futile conversation at her above the din.
"I like the hat!" he bawled.
"What?"
"I said, I like the hat."
"I'm not wearing a hat."
"Well, I like the head, then."
"What?"
"I said, I like the head. Interesting bone structure."
"What?"
Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of other movements he was performing.
"I said you dance great," he shouted, "just don't nod so much."
"What?"
"It's just that every time you nod," said Ford," ... ow!" he added as his partner nodded forward to say "What?" and once again pecked him sharply on the forehead with the sharp end of her swept-forward skull. "My planet was blown up one morning," said Arthur, who had found himself quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story, or at least, edited highlights of it, "that's why I'm dressed like this, in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see. I didn't realize I'd be coming to a party."
The little man nodded enthusiastically.
"Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing gown. Rather than the spacesuit one would normally expect. Shortly after that I discovered that my planet had originally been built for a bunch of mice. You can imagine how I felt about that. I was then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I have been blown up ridiculously often, shot at, insulted, regularly disintegrated, deprived of tea and recently I crashed into a swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave."
"Ah," effervesced the little man, "and did you have a wonderful time?" Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.
"What a wonderfully exciting cough," said the little man, quite startled by it, "do you mind if I join you?"
And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of coughing that caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused. Together they performed a lung-busting duet that went on for fully two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt.
"So invigorating," said the little man, panting and wiping tears from his eyes, "what an exciting life you must lead. Thank you very much."
He shook Arthur warmly by the hand and walked off into the crowd. Arthur shook his head in astonishment.
A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type with a hook mouth, a lantern nose and small beady little cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers, a black silk shirt open to what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learned never to make assumptions about the anatomies of the son of people he tended to meet these days, and had all sons of nasty dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He carried something in a black bag, and clearly wanted people to notice that he didn't want them to notice it.
"Hey, er, did I hear you say your name just now?" he said.
This was one of the many things that Arthur had told the enthusiastic little man.
"Yes, it's Arthur Dent."
The man seemed to be dancing slightly to some rhythm other than any of the several that the band was grimly pushing out.
"Yeah," he said, "only there was a man in a mountain wanted to see you."
"I met him."
"Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know."
"Yes, I met him."
"Yeah, well, I think you should know that."
"I do. I met him."
The man paused to chew a little gum. Then he clapped Arthur on the back.
"Okay," he said, "all right. I'm just telling you, right? Good night, good luck, win awards."
"What?" said Arthur, who was beginning to flounder seriously at this point.
"Whatever. Do what you do. Do it well." He made a sort of clucking noise with whatever he was chewing and then some vaguely dynamic gesture.
"Why?" said Arthur.
"Do it badly," said the man. "Who cares? Who gives a swut?" The blood suddenly seemed to pump angrily into the man's face and he started to shout.
"Why not go mad?" he said. "Go away, get off my back, will you, guy? Just zark off!!!"
"It's been real." The man gave a sharp wave and disappeared off into the throng.
"What was that all about?" asked Arthur to a girl he found standing beside him. "Why did he tell me to win awards?"
"Just show biz talk; " answered the girl. "He just won an award at the Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards ceremony, and he was hoping to be able to pass it off lightly, only you didn't mention it so he couldn't."
"Oh," said Arthur, "oh, well, I'm sorry I didn't. What was it for?"
"The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word 'Belgium' in a Serious Screenplay. It's very prestigious."
"The most gratuitous use of which word?" asked Arthur, with a determined attempt to keep his brain in neutral.
"Belgium," said the girl, "I hardly like to say it."
"Belgium?" exclaimed Arthur.
A drunken seven-toed sloth staggered past, gawked at the word and threw itself backward at a blurry-eyed pterodactyl, roaring with displeasure.
"Are we talking," said Arthur, "about the very flat country, with all the EEC and the fog?"
"What?" said the girl.
"Belgium," said Arthur.
"Raaaaarrrchchchchch!" screeched the pterodactyl.
"Grrruuuuuurrrghhhh," agreed the seven-toed sloth.
"They must be thinking of Ostend Hoverport," muttered Arthur. He turned back to the girl.
"Have you ever been to Belgium in fact?" he asked brightly and she nearly hit him.
"I think," she said, restraining herself, "that you should restrict that sort of remark to something artistic."
"You sound as if I just said something unspeakably rude."
"You did."
In today's modern Galaxy there is of course very little still held to be unspeakable. Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.
So, for instance, when in a recent national speech the Financial Minister of the Royal World Estate of Quarlvista actually dared to say that due to one thing and another and the fact that no one had made any food for a while and the king seemed to have died and most of the population had been on holiday now for over three years, the economy was now in what he called "one whole joojooflop situation," everyone was so pleased that he felt able to come out and say it that they quite failed to note that their entire five-thousand-year-old civilization had just collapsed overnight.
But even though words like "joojooflop," "swut," and "turlingdrome" are now perfectly acceptable in common usage there is one word that is still beyond the pale. The concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the Galaxy except for use in Serious Screenplays. There is also, or was, one planet where they didn't know what it meant, the stupid turlingdromes.
***
"I see," said Arthur, who didn't, "so what do you get for using the name of a perfectly innocent if slightly dull European country gratuitously in a Serious Screenplay?"
"A Rory," said the girl, "it's just a small silver thing set on a large black base. What did you say?"
"I didn't say anything, I was just about to ask what the silver ..."
"Oh, I thought you said 'whop.'"
"Said what?"
"Whop."
The first thing Arthur noticed as they entered into the thick of the party, apart from the noise, the suffocating heat, the wild profusion of colors that protruded dimly through the atmosphere of heady smoke, the carpets thick with ground glass, ash and guacamole droppings, and the small group of pterodactyl-like creatures in Lurex who descended on his cherished bottle of retsina, squawking, " A new pleasure, a new pleasure," was Trillian being chatted up by a Thunder God.
"Didn't I see you at Milliways?" he was saying.
"Were you the one with the hammer?"
"Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more fraught."
Squeals of some hideous pleasure rang around the room, the outer dimensions of which were invisible through the heaving throng of happy noisy creatures, cheerfully yelling at each other things that nobody could hear and occasionally having crises.
"Seems fun," said Trillian. "What did you say, Arthur?"
"I said, how the hell did you get here?"
"I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe. Have you met Thor? He makes thunder."
"Hello," said Arthur. "I expect that must be very interesting."
"Hi," said Thor, "it is. Have you got a drink?"
"Er, no actually ..."
"Then why don't you go and get one?"
"See you later, Arthur," said Trillian.
Something jogged Arthur's mind, and he looked around huntedly.
"Zaphod isn't here, is he?" he said.
"See you," said Trillian firmly, "later."
Thor glared at him with hard coal-black eyes, his beard bristling. What little light there was in the place mustered its forces briefly to glint menacingly off the horns on his helmet.
He took Trillian's elbow in his extremely large hand and the muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of Volkswagens parking.
He led her away.
"One of the interesting things about being immortal," he said, "is ..."
"One of the interesting things about space," Arthur heard Slartibartfast saying to a large and voluminous creature who looked like someone losing a fight with a pink comforter and was gazing raptly at the old man's deep eyes and silver beard, "is how dull it is."
"Dull?" said the creature, and blinked her rather wrinkled and bloodshot eyes.
"Yes," said Slartibartfast, "staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there's so much of it and so little in it. Would you like me to quote you some statistics?"
"Er, well ..."
"Please, I would like to. They, too, are quite sensationally dull."
"I'll come back and hear them in a moment," she said, patted him on the arm, lifted up her skirts like a Hovercraft and moved off into the heaving crowd.
"I thought she'd never go," growled the old man. "Come, Earth man ..."
"Arthur."
"We must find the Silver Bail, it is here somewhere."
"Can't we just relax a little," Arthur said. "I've had a tough day. Trillian's here, incidentally, she didn't say how; it probably doesn't matter."
"Think of the danger to the Universe ..."
"The Universe," said Arthur, "is big enough and old enough to look after itself for half an hour. All right," he added, in response to Slartibartfast's increasing agitation, "I'll wander round and see if anybody's seen it."
"Good, good," said Slartibartfast, "good." He plunged into the crowd himself, and was told to relax by everybody he passed.
"Have you seen a bail anywhere?" said Arthur to a little man who seemed to be standing eagerly waiting to listen to somebody. "It's made of silver, vitally important for the future safety of the Universe, and about this long."
"No," said the enthusiastically wizened little man, "but do have a drink and tell me all about it."
Ford Prefect writhed past, dancing a wild, frenetic and not entirely unobscene dance with someone who looked as if she were wearing Sydney Opera House on her head. He was yelling a futile conversation at her above the din.
"I like the hat!" he bawled.
"What?"
"I said, I like the hat."
"I'm not wearing a hat."
"Well, I like the head, then."
"What?"
"I said, I like the head. Interesting bone structure."
"What?"
Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of other movements he was performing.
"I said you dance great," he shouted, "just don't nod so much."
"What?"
"It's just that every time you nod," said Ford," ... ow!" he added as his partner nodded forward to say "What?" and once again pecked him sharply on the forehead with the sharp end of her swept-forward skull. "My planet was blown up one morning," said Arthur, who had found himself quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story, or at least, edited highlights of it, "that's why I'm dressed like this, in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see. I didn't realize I'd be coming to a party."
The little man nodded enthusiastically.
"Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing gown. Rather than the spacesuit one would normally expect. Shortly after that I discovered that my planet had originally been built for a bunch of mice. You can imagine how I felt about that. I was then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I have been blown up ridiculously often, shot at, insulted, regularly disintegrated, deprived of tea and recently I crashed into a swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave."
"Ah," effervesced the little man, "and did you have a wonderful time?" Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.
"What a wonderfully exciting cough," said the little man, quite startled by it, "do you mind if I join you?"
And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of coughing that caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused. Together they performed a lung-busting duet that went on for fully two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt.
"So invigorating," said the little man, panting and wiping tears from his eyes, "what an exciting life you must lead. Thank you very much."
He shook Arthur warmly by the hand and walked off into the crowd. Arthur shook his head in astonishment.
A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type with a hook mouth, a lantern nose and small beady little cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers, a black silk shirt open to what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learned never to make assumptions about the anatomies of the son of people he tended to meet these days, and had all sons of nasty dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He carried something in a black bag, and clearly wanted people to notice that he didn't want them to notice it.
"Hey, er, did I hear you say your name just now?" he said.
This was one of the many things that Arthur had told the enthusiastic little man.
"Yes, it's Arthur Dent."
The man seemed to be dancing slightly to some rhythm other than any of the several that the band was grimly pushing out.
"Yeah," he said, "only there was a man in a mountain wanted to see you."
"I met him."
"Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know."
"Yes, I met him."
"Yeah, well, I think you should know that."
"I do. I met him."
The man paused to chew a little gum. Then he clapped Arthur on the back.
"Okay," he said, "all right. I'm just telling you, right? Good night, good luck, win awards."
"What?" said Arthur, who was beginning to flounder seriously at this point.
"Whatever. Do what you do. Do it well." He made a sort of clucking noise with whatever he was chewing and then some vaguely dynamic gesture.
"Why?" said Arthur.
"Do it badly," said the man. "Who cares? Who gives a swut?" The blood suddenly seemed to pump angrily into the man's face and he started to shout.
"Why not go mad?" he said. "Go away, get off my back, will you, guy? Just zark off!!!"
"It's been real." The man gave a sharp wave and disappeared off into the throng.
"What was that all about?" asked Arthur to a girl he found standing beside him. "Why did he tell me to win awards?"
"Just show biz talk; " answered the girl. "He just won an award at the Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards ceremony, and he was hoping to be able to pass it off lightly, only you didn't mention it so he couldn't."
"Oh," said Arthur, "oh, well, I'm sorry I didn't. What was it for?"
"The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word 'Belgium' in a Serious Screenplay. It's very prestigious."
"The most gratuitous use of which word?" asked Arthur, with a determined attempt to keep his brain in neutral.
"Belgium," said the girl, "I hardly like to say it."
"Belgium?" exclaimed Arthur.
A drunken seven-toed sloth staggered past, gawked at the word and threw itself backward at a blurry-eyed pterodactyl, roaring with displeasure.
"Are we talking," said Arthur, "about the very flat country, with all the EEC and the fog?"
"What?" said the girl.
"Belgium," said Arthur.
"Raaaaarrrchchchchch!" screeched the pterodactyl.
"Grrruuuuuurrrghhhh," agreed the seven-toed sloth.
"They must be thinking of Ostend Hoverport," muttered Arthur. He turned back to the girl.
"Have you ever been to Belgium in fact?" he asked brightly and she nearly hit him.
"I think," she said, restraining herself, "that you should restrict that sort of remark to something artistic."
"You sound as if I just said something unspeakably rude."
"You did."
In today's modern Galaxy there is of course very little still held to be unspeakable. Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.
So, for instance, when in a recent national speech the Financial Minister of the Royal World Estate of Quarlvista actually dared to say that due to one thing and another and the fact that no one had made any food for a while and the king seemed to have died and most of the population had been on holiday now for over three years, the economy was now in what he called "one whole joojooflop situation," everyone was so pleased that he felt able to come out and say it that they quite failed to note that their entire five-thousand-year-old civilization had just collapsed overnight.
But even though words like "joojooflop," "swut," and "turlingdrome" are now perfectly acceptable in common usage there is one word that is still beyond the pale. The concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the Galaxy except for use in Serious Screenplays. There is also, or was, one planet where they didn't know what it meant, the stupid turlingdromes.
***
"I see," said Arthur, who didn't, "so what do you get for using the name of a perfectly innocent if slightly dull European country gratuitously in a Serious Screenplay?"
"A Rory," said the girl, "it's just a small silver thing set on a large black base. What did you say?"
"I didn't say anything, I was just about to ask what the silver ..."
"Oh, I thought you said 'whop.'"
"Said what?"
"Whop."
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:48 pm
Chapter 22
People had been dropping in on the party now for some years, fashionable gate-crashers from other worlds, and for some time it had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked out at their own world beneath them, with its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards, its vast tracts of new desert, its seas full of cracker crumbs and worse, that their world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they could manage to stay sober for long enough to make the entire party spaceworthy and maybe take it off to some other people's worlds where the air might be fresher and give them fewer headaches.
The few undernourished farmers who still managed to scratch out a feeble existence on the half-dead ground of the planet's surface would have been extremely pleased to hear this, but that day, as the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked up in haggard fear of yet another cheese and wine raid, it became clear that the party was not going anywhere else for a while, that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be time to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was, what time of year it was and whether in any of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi going anywhere.
The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a strange white spaceship that seemed to be half sticking through it. Together they were lurching, heaving and spinning their way around the sky in grotesque disregard of their own weight.
The clouds parted. The air roared and leaped out of their way. The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, while the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and certainly not while it, the second duck, was busy flying.
The sky sang and screamed with the rage of it all and buffeted the ground with shock waves.
And suddenly, with a foop, the Krikkit ship was gone.
The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man leaning against an unexpectedly open door. It spun and wobbled on its Hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead. It staggered back across the sky again.
For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly they could not continue for long. The party was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional broken-backed pirouette could not disguise.
The longer, at this point, that it avoided the ground, the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.
***
Inside things were not going well either. They were going monstrously badly in fact and people were hating it and saying so loudly.
The Krikkit robots had been.
They had removed the award for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium" in a Serious Screenplay, and in its place had left a scene of devastation that left Arthur feeling almost as sick as a runner-up for a Rory.
"We would love to stay and help," shouted Ford, picking his way over the mangled debris, "only we're not going to."
The party lurched again, provoking feverish cries and groans from among the smoking wreckage.
"We have to go and save the Universe, you see," said Ford, "and if that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right. Either way we're off."
He suddenly came across an unopened bottle lying, miraculously unbroken, on the ground.
"Do you mind if we take this?" he said. "You won't be needing it."
He took a packet of potato chips, too.
"Trillian?" shouted Arthur in a shocked and weakened voice. In the smoking mess he could see nothing.
"Earthman, we must go," said Slartibartfast nervously.
"Trillian?" shouted Arthur again.
A moment or two later, Trillian staggered, shaking, into view, supported by her new friend the Thunder God.
"The girl stays with me," said Thor. "There's a great party going on in Valhalla, we'll by flying off. ..."
"Where were you when all this was going on?" said Arthur.
"Upstairs," said Thor. "I was weighing her. Flying's a tricky business, you see, you have to calculate wind ..."
"She comes with us," said Arthur.
"Hey," said Trillian, "don't I ..."
"No," said Arthur, "you come with us."
Thor looked at him with slowly smoldering eyes. He was making some point about godliness and it had nothing to do with being clean.
"She comes with me," he said quietly.
"Come on, Earthman," said Slartibartfast nervously, picking at Arthur's sleeve.
"Come on, Slartibartfast," said Ford nervously, picking at the old man's sleeve. Slartibartfast had the teleport device.
The party lurched and swayed, sending everyone reeling, except for Thor and except for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the Thunder God's black eyes.
Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what now appeared to be his tiny little fists.
"Want to make something of it?" he said.
"I beg your minuscule pardon?" roared Thor.
"I said," repeated Arthur, and he could not keep the quavering out of his voice, "do you want to make something of it?" He waggled his fists ridiculously.
Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of smoke curled upward from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in it, too.
He gripped his belt.
He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.
He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it up in his hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up a possible misunderstanding that he might merely have been carrying a telegraph pole around with him.
"Do I want," he said, with a hiss like a river flowing through a steel mill, "to make something of it?"
"Yes," said Arthur, his voice suddenly and extraordinarily strong and belligerent. He waggled his fists, again, this time as if he meant it.
"You want to step outside?" he snarled at Thor.
"All right!" bellowed Thor, like an enraged bull (or in fact like an enraged Thunder God, which is a great deal more impressive), and did so.
"Good," said Arthur, "that's got rid of him. Slarty, get us out of here."
People had been dropping in on the party now for some years, fashionable gate-crashers from other worlds, and for some time it had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked out at their own world beneath them, with its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards, its vast tracts of new desert, its seas full of cracker crumbs and worse, that their world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they could manage to stay sober for long enough to make the entire party spaceworthy and maybe take it off to some other people's worlds where the air might be fresher and give them fewer headaches.
The few undernourished farmers who still managed to scratch out a feeble existence on the half-dead ground of the planet's surface would have been extremely pleased to hear this, but that day, as the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked up in haggard fear of yet another cheese and wine raid, it became clear that the party was not going anywhere else for a while, that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be time to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was, what time of year it was and whether in any of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi going anywhere.
The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a strange white spaceship that seemed to be half sticking through it. Together they were lurching, heaving and spinning their way around the sky in grotesque disregard of their own weight.
The clouds parted. The air roared and leaped out of their way. The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, while the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and certainly not while it, the second duck, was busy flying.
The sky sang and screamed with the rage of it all and buffeted the ground with shock waves.
And suddenly, with a foop, the Krikkit ship was gone.
The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man leaning against an unexpectedly open door. It spun and wobbled on its Hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead. It staggered back across the sky again.
For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly they could not continue for long. The party was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional broken-backed pirouette could not disguise.
The longer, at this point, that it avoided the ground, the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.
***
Inside things were not going well either. They were going monstrously badly in fact and people were hating it and saying so loudly.
The Krikkit robots had been.
They had removed the award for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium" in a Serious Screenplay, and in its place had left a scene of devastation that left Arthur feeling almost as sick as a runner-up for a Rory.
"We would love to stay and help," shouted Ford, picking his way over the mangled debris, "only we're not going to."
The party lurched again, provoking feverish cries and groans from among the smoking wreckage.
"We have to go and save the Universe, you see," said Ford, "and if that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right. Either way we're off."
He suddenly came across an unopened bottle lying, miraculously unbroken, on the ground.
"Do you mind if we take this?" he said. "You won't be needing it."
He took a packet of potato chips, too.
"Trillian?" shouted Arthur in a shocked and weakened voice. In the smoking mess he could see nothing.
"Earthman, we must go," said Slartibartfast nervously.
"Trillian?" shouted Arthur again.
A moment or two later, Trillian staggered, shaking, into view, supported by her new friend the Thunder God.
"The girl stays with me," said Thor. "There's a great party going on in Valhalla, we'll by flying off. ..."
"Where were you when all this was going on?" said Arthur.
"Upstairs," said Thor. "I was weighing her. Flying's a tricky business, you see, you have to calculate wind ..."
"She comes with us," said Arthur.
"Hey," said Trillian, "don't I ..."
"No," said Arthur, "you come with us."
Thor looked at him with slowly smoldering eyes. He was making some point about godliness and it had nothing to do with being clean.
"She comes with me," he said quietly.
"Come on, Earthman," said Slartibartfast nervously, picking at Arthur's sleeve.
"Come on, Slartibartfast," said Ford nervously, picking at the old man's sleeve. Slartibartfast had the teleport device.
The party lurched and swayed, sending everyone reeling, except for Thor and except for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the Thunder God's black eyes.
Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what now appeared to be his tiny little fists.
"Want to make something of it?" he said.
"I beg your minuscule pardon?" roared Thor.
"I said," repeated Arthur, and he could not keep the quavering out of his voice, "do you want to make something of it?" He waggled his fists ridiculously.
Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of smoke curled upward from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in it, too.
He gripped his belt.
He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.
He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it up in his hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up a possible misunderstanding that he might merely have been carrying a telegraph pole around with him.
"Do I want," he said, with a hiss like a river flowing through a steel mill, "to make something of it?"
"Yes," said Arthur, his voice suddenly and extraordinarily strong and belligerent. He waggled his fists, again, this time as if he meant it.
"You want to step outside?" he snarled at Thor.
"All right!" bellowed Thor, like an enraged bull (or in fact like an enraged Thunder God, which is a great deal more impressive), and did so.
"Good," said Arthur, "that's got rid of him. Slarty, get us out of here."
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:48 pm
Chapter 23
"All right," shouted Ford at Arthur, "so I'm a coward, the point is I'm still alive." They were back aboard the starship Bistromath. So was Slartibartfast. So was Trillian. Harmony and concord were not.
"Well, so am I alive, aren't I?" retaliated Arthur, haggard with adventure and anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if they wanted to punch each other.
"You damn nearly weren't," exploded Ford.
Arthur turned sharply to Slartibartfast, who was sitting in his pilot couch on the flight deck gazing thoughtfully into the bottom of a bottle that was telling him something he clearly couldn't fathom. He appealed to him.
"Do you think he understands the first word I've been saying?" he said, quivering with emotion.
"I don't know," replied Slartibartfast, a little abstractedly. "I'm not sure," he added, glancing up very briefly, "that I do." He stared at his instruments with renewed vigor and bafflement. "You'll have to explain it to us again," he said.
"Well ..."
"But later. Terrible things are afoot."
He tapped the pseudoglass of the bottle bottom.
"We fared rather pathetically at the party, I'm afraid," he said, "and our only hope now is to try to prevent the robots from using the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that I don't know," he muttered, "just have to go there, I suppose. Can't say I like the idea at all. Probably end up dead."
"Where is Trillian anyway?" said Arthur with a sudden affectation of unconcern. What he had been angry about was that Ford had berated him for wasting time over all the business with the Thunder God when they could have been making a rather more rapid escape. Arthur's own opinion, and he had offered it for whatever anybody might have felt it was worth, was that he had been extraordinarily brave and resourceful.
The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys. What really hurt, though, was that Trillian didn't seem to react much one way or the other and had wandered off somewhere.
"And where are my potato chips?" said Ford.
"They are both," said Slartibartfast, without looking up, "in the room of Informational Illusions. I think that your young lady friend is trying to understand some problems of Galactic history. I think the potato chips are probably helping her."
"All right," shouted Ford at Arthur, "so I'm a coward, the point is I'm still alive." They were back aboard the starship Bistromath. So was Slartibartfast. So was Trillian. Harmony and concord were not.
"Well, so am I alive, aren't I?" retaliated Arthur, haggard with adventure and anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if they wanted to punch each other.
"You damn nearly weren't," exploded Ford.
Arthur turned sharply to Slartibartfast, who was sitting in his pilot couch on the flight deck gazing thoughtfully into the bottom of a bottle that was telling him something he clearly couldn't fathom. He appealed to him.
"Do you think he understands the first word I've been saying?" he said, quivering with emotion.
"I don't know," replied Slartibartfast, a little abstractedly. "I'm not sure," he added, glancing up very briefly, "that I do." He stared at his instruments with renewed vigor and bafflement. "You'll have to explain it to us again," he said.
"Well ..."
"But later. Terrible things are afoot."
He tapped the pseudoglass of the bottle bottom.
"We fared rather pathetically at the party, I'm afraid," he said, "and our only hope now is to try to prevent the robots from using the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that I don't know," he muttered, "just have to go there, I suppose. Can't say I like the idea at all. Probably end up dead."
"Where is Trillian anyway?" said Arthur with a sudden affectation of unconcern. What he had been angry about was that Ford had berated him for wasting time over all the business with the Thunder God when they could have been making a rather more rapid escape. Arthur's own opinion, and he had offered it for whatever anybody might have felt it was worth, was that he had been extraordinarily brave and resourceful.
The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys. What really hurt, though, was that Trillian didn't seem to react much one way or the other and had wandered off somewhere.
"And where are my potato chips?" said Ford.
"They are both," said Slartibartfast, without looking up, "in the room of Informational Illusions. I think that your young lady friend is trying to understand some problems of Galactic history. I think the potato chips are probably helping her."
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:48 pm
Chapter 24
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
For instance, there was once an insanely aggressive race of people called the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of their race. The name of their army was something quite horrific. Luckily they lived even farther back in Galactic history than anything we have so far encountered -- twenty billion years ago -- when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one.
And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were good at, and being good at it, they did it a lot. They fought their enemies (i.e., everybody else), they fought each other. Their planet was a complete wreck. The surface was littered with abandoned cities that were surrounded by abandoned war machines, which were in turn surrounded by deep bunkers in which the Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.
The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend of Striterax was just to be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way of life, one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of energy. The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him in a room on his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.
Eventually they realized that this was something they were going to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggression.
For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead.
This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things, and they all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for weeks.
Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax is that they were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer.
It was a gigantic spaceborne computer called Hactar, which to this day is remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. It was the first to be built like a natural brain, in that every cellular particle of it carried the pattern of the whole within it, which enabled it to think more flexibly and imaginatively, and also, it seemed, to be shocked.
The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were engaged in one of their regular wars with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and were not enjoying it as much as usual because it involved an awful lot of trekking through the Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda and across the Fire Mountains of Frazfraga, neither of which terrains they felt at home in.
So when the Strangulous Stillettans of Jajazikstak joined in the fray and forced them to fight another front in the Gamma Caves of Carfrax and the Ice Storms of Varlengooten, they decided that enough was enough, and they ordered Hactar to design for them an Ultimate Weapon.
"What do you mean," asked Hactar, "by Ultimate?"
To which the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax said, "Read a bloody dictionary," and plunged back into the fray.
So Hactar designed an Ultimate Weapon. It was a very, very small bomb that was simply a junction box in hyperspace which would, when activated, connect the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously and thus turn the entire Universe into one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.
When the Silastic Armorfiends tried to use it to blow up a Strangulous Stillettan munitions dump in one of the Gamma Caves, they were extremely irritated that it didn't work, and said so.
Hactar had been shocked by the whole idea.
He tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate Weapon business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than the known consequence of setting it off, and he had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the design of the bomb, and he hoped that everyone involved would, on sober reflection, feel that ...
The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer. Later they thought better of it, and destroyed the faulty bomb as well. Then, pausing only to smash the hell out of the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and the Strangulous Stillettans of jajazikstak, they then went on to find an entirely new way of blowing themselves up, which was a profound relief to everyone else in the Galaxy, particularly the Garflghters, the Stillettans and the potatoes.
Trillian had watched all this, as well as the story of Krikkit. She emerged from the room of Informational Illusions thoughtfully, just in time to discover that they had arrived too late.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
For instance, there was once an insanely aggressive race of people called the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of their race. The name of their army was something quite horrific. Luckily they lived even farther back in Galactic history than anything we have so far encountered -- twenty billion years ago -- when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one.
And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were good at, and being good at it, they did it a lot. They fought their enemies (i.e., everybody else), they fought each other. Their planet was a complete wreck. The surface was littered with abandoned cities that were surrounded by abandoned war machines, which were in turn surrounded by deep bunkers in which the Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.
The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend of Striterax was just to be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way of life, one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of energy. The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him in a room on his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.
Eventually they realized that this was something they were going to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggression.
For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead.
This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things, and they all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for weeks.
Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax is that they were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer.
It was a gigantic spaceborne computer called Hactar, which to this day is remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. It was the first to be built like a natural brain, in that every cellular particle of it carried the pattern of the whole within it, which enabled it to think more flexibly and imaginatively, and also, it seemed, to be shocked.
The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were engaged in one of their regular wars with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and were not enjoying it as much as usual because it involved an awful lot of trekking through the Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda and across the Fire Mountains of Frazfraga, neither of which terrains they felt at home in.
So when the Strangulous Stillettans of Jajazikstak joined in the fray and forced them to fight another front in the Gamma Caves of Carfrax and the Ice Storms of Varlengooten, they decided that enough was enough, and they ordered Hactar to design for them an Ultimate Weapon.
"What do you mean," asked Hactar, "by Ultimate?"
To which the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax said, "Read a bloody dictionary," and plunged back into the fray.
So Hactar designed an Ultimate Weapon. It was a very, very small bomb that was simply a junction box in hyperspace which would, when activated, connect the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously and thus turn the entire Universe into one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.
When the Silastic Armorfiends tried to use it to blow up a Strangulous Stillettan munitions dump in one of the Gamma Caves, they were extremely irritated that it didn't work, and said so.
Hactar had been shocked by the whole idea.
He tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate Weapon business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than the known consequence of setting it off, and he had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the design of the bomb, and he hoped that everyone involved would, on sober reflection, feel that ...
The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer. Later they thought better of it, and destroyed the faulty bomb as well. Then, pausing only to smash the hell out of the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and the Strangulous Stillettans of jajazikstak, they then went on to find an entirely new way of blowing themselves up, which was a profound relief to everyone else in the Galaxy, particularly the Garflghters, the Stillettans and the potatoes.
Trillian had watched all this, as well as the story of Krikkit. She emerged from the room of Informational Illusions thoughtfully, just in time to discover that they had arrived too late.
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:48 pm
Chapter 25
Even as the starship Bistromath flickered into objective being on the top of a small cliff on the mile-wide asteroid that pursued a lonely and eternal path in orbit around the enclosed star system of Krikkit, its crew was aware that they were in time only to be witnesses to an unstoppable historic event.
They didn't realize they were going to see two.
They stood cold, lonely and helpless on the cliff edge and watched the activity below. Lances of light wheeled in sinister arcs against the void from a point only about a hundred yards below and in front of them.
They stared into the blinding event.
An extension of the ship's field enabled them to stand there by once again exploiting the mind's predisposition to have tricks played on it: the problems of falling up off the tiny mass of the asteroid, or of not being able to breathe simply became Somebody Else's.
The white Krikkit warship was parked among the stark gray crags of the asteroid, alternately flaring under arc lights or disappearing in shadow. The black shadows cast by the hard rocks danced together in wild choreography as the arc lights swept around them.
The eleven white robots were bearing, in procession, the Wikkit Key out into the middle of a circle of swinging lights.
The Wikkit Key had been rebuilt. Its components shone and glittered: the Steel Pillar (or Marvin's leg) of Strength and Power, the Golden Bail (or heart of the Infinite Improbability Drive) of Prosperity, the Plastic Pillar (or Argabuthon Scepter of Justice) of Science and Reason, the Silver Bail (or Rory Award for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium" in a Serious Screenplay) and the now reconstituted Wooden Pillar (or Ashes of a burnt stump signifying the death of English cricket) of Nature and Spirituality.
"I suppose there is nothing we can do at this point?" asked Arthur nervously.
"No," sighed Slartibartfast.
The expression of disappointment that crossed Arthur's face was a complete failure and, since he was standing obscured by shadow, he allowed it to collapse into one of relief.
"Pity," he said.
"We have no weapons," said Slartibartfast, "stupidly."
"Damn," said Arthur, very quietly.
Ford said nothing.
Trillian said nothing, but in a peculiarly thoughtful and distinct way. She was staring at that blankness of the space beyond the asteroid.
The asteroid circled the Dust Cloud that surrounded the Slo-Time envelope that enclosed the world on which lived the people of Krikkit -- the Masters of Krikkit and their killer robots.
The helpless group had no way of knowing whether or not the Krikkit robots were aware of their presence. They could only assume they must be, but they felt, quite rightly in the circumstances, that they had nothing to fear. They had a historic task to perform, and their audience could be regarded with contempt.
"Terribly impotent feeling, isn't it?" said Arthur, but the others ignored him.
In the center of the area of light that the robots were approaching, a square-shaped crack appeared in the ground. The crack defined itself more and more distinctly, and soon it became clear that a block of the ground, about six feet square, was slowly rising.
At the same time, they became aware of some other movement, but it was almost subliminal, and for a moment or two it was not clear what it was that was moving.
Then it became clear.
The asteroid was moving. It was moving in toward the Dust Cloud, as if being hauled inexorably by some celestial angler in its depths.
They were to make in real life the journey through the Cloud that they had already made in the room of Informational Illusions. They stood frozen in silence. Trillian frowned.
An age seemed to pass. Events seemed to pass with spinning slowness, as the leading edge of the asteroid passed into the vague and soft outer perimeter of the Cloud.
And soon they were engulfed in a thin and dancing obscurity. They passed on through it, on and on, dimly aware of vague shapes and whorls indistinguishable in the darkness except in the corner of the eye.
The dust dimmed the shafts of brilliant light. The shafts of brilliant light twinkled on the myriad specks of dust.
Trillian, again, regarded the passage from within her own frowning thoughts.
And they were through it. Whether it had taken a minute or half an hour they weren't sure, but they were through it and confronted with a fresh blankness, as if space were pinched out of existence in front of them.
And now things moved quickly.
A blinding shaft of light seemed almost to explode from out of the block that had risen three feet out of the ground, and out of that rose a smaller plastic block, dazzling with interior dancing colors.
The block was slotted with deep grooves, three upright and two across, clearly designed to accept the Wikkit Key.
The robots approached the Lock, slotted the Key into its home and stepped back again. The block twisted around of its own accord, and space began to alter.
As space unpinched itself, it seemed agonizingly to twist the eyes of the watchers in their sockets. They found themselves staring, blinded at an unraveled sun that stood now before them where it seemed only seconds before there had not been even empty space. It was a second or two before they were even sufficiently aware of what had happened to throw their hands up over their horrified blinded eyes. In that second or two, they were aware of a tiny speck moving slowly across the eye of that sun.
They staggered back, and heard ringing in their ears the thin and unexpected chant of the robots crying out in unison.
"Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit!"
The sound chilled them. It was harsh, it was cold, it was empty, it was mechanically dismal.
It was also triumphant.
They were so stunned by these two sensory shocks that they almost missed the second historic event.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to survive a direct blast attack from the Krikkit robots, ran out of the Krikkit warship brandishing a Zap gun.
"Okay," he cried, "the situation is totally under control as of this moment in time."
The single robot guarding the hatchway to the ship silently swung his battleclub, and connected it with the back of Zaphod's left head.
"Who the zark did that?" said his left head, and lolled sickeningly forward.
His right head gazed keenly into the middle distance.
"Who did what?" it said.
The club connected with the back of his right head.
Zaphod measured his length and rather strange shape on the ground.
Within a matter of seconds the whole event was over. A few blasts from the robots were sufficient to destroy the Lock forever. It split and melted and splayed its contents brokenly, and robots marched grimly and, it almost seemed, in a slightly disheartened manner, back into their warship which, with a "foop," was gone.
Trillian and Ford ran hectically around and down the steep incline to the dark still body of Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Even as the starship Bistromath flickered into objective being on the top of a small cliff on the mile-wide asteroid that pursued a lonely and eternal path in orbit around the enclosed star system of Krikkit, its crew was aware that they were in time only to be witnesses to an unstoppable historic event.
They didn't realize they were going to see two.
They stood cold, lonely and helpless on the cliff edge and watched the activity below. Lances of light wheeled in sinister arcs against the void from a point only about a hundred yards below and in front of them.
They stared into the blinding event.
An extension of the ship's field enabled them to stand there by once again exploiting the mind's predisposition to have tricks played on it: the problems of falling up off the tiny mass of the asteroid, or of not being able to breathe simply became Somebody Else's.
The white Krikkit warship was parked among the stark gray crags of the asteroid, alternately flaring under arc lights or disappearing in shadow. The black shadows cast by the hard rocks danced together in wild choreography as the arc lights swept around them.
The eleven white robots were bearing, in procession, the Wikkit Key out into the middle of a circle of swinging lights.
The Wikkit Key had been rebuilt. Its components shone and glittered: the Steel Pillar (or Marvin's leg) of Strength and Power, the Golden Bail (or heart of the Infinite Improbability Drive) of Prosperity, the Plastic Pillar (or Argabuthon Scepter of Justice) of Science and Reason, the Silver Bail (or Rory Award for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium" in a Serious Screenplay) and the now reconstituted Wooden Pillar (or Ashes of a burnt stump signifying the death of English cricket) of Nature and Spirituality.
"I suppose there is nothing we can do at this point?" asked Arthur nervously.
"No," sighed Slartibartfast.
The expression of disappointment that crossed Arthur's face was a complete failure and, since he was standing obscured by shadow, he allowed it to collapse into one of relief.
"Pity," he said.
"We have no weapons," said Slartibartfast, "stupidly."
"Damn," said Arthur, very quietly.
Ford said nothing.
Trillian said nothing, but in a peculiarly thoughtful and distinct way. She was staring at that blankness of the space beyond the asteroid.
The asteroid circled the Dust Cloud that surrounded the Slo-Time envelope that enclosed the world on which lived the people of Krikkit -- the Masters of Krikkit and their killer robots.
The helpless group had no way of knowing whether or not the Krikkit robots were aware of their presence. They could only assume they must be, but they felt, quite rightly in the circumstances, that they had nothing to fear. They had a historic task to perform, and their audience could be regarded with contempt.
"Terribly impotent feeling, isn't it?" said Arthur, but the others ignored him.
In the center of the area of light that the robots were approaching, a square-shaped crack appeared in the ground. The crack defined itself more and more distinctly, and soon it became clear that a block of the ground, about six feet square, was slowly rising.
At the same time, they became aware of some other movement, but it was almost subliminal, and for a moment or two it was not clear what it was that was moving.
Then it became clear.
The asteroid was moving. It was moving in toward the Dust Cloud, as if being hauled inexorably by some celestial angler in its depths.
They were to make in real life the journey through the Cloud that they had already made in the room of Informational Illusions. They stood frozen in silence. Trillian frowned.
An age seemed to pass. Events seemed to pass with spinning slowness, as the leading edge of the asteroid passed into the vague and soft outer perimeter of the Cloud.
And soon they were engulfed in a thin and dancing obscurity. They passed on through it, on and on, dimly aware of vague shapes and whorls indistinguishable in the darkness except in the corner of the eye.
The dust dimmed the shafts of brilliant light. The shafts of brilliant light twinkled on the myriad specks of dust.
Trillian, again, regarded the passage from within her own frowning thoughts.
And they were through it. Whether it had taken a minute or half an hour they weren't sure, but they were through it and confronted with a fresh blankness, as if space were pinched out of existence in front of them.
And now things moved quickly.
A blinding shaft of light seemed almost to explode from out of the block that had risen three feet out of the ground, and out of that rose a smaller plastic block, dazzling with interior dancing colors.
The block was slotted with deep grooves, three upright and two across, clearly designed to accept the Wikkit Key.
The robots approached the Lock, slotted the Key into its home and stepped back again. The block twisted around of its own accord, and space began to alter.
As space unpinched itself, it seemed agonizingly to twist the eyes of the watchers in their sockets. They found themselves staring, blinded at an unraveled sun that stood now before them where it seemed only seconds before there had not been even empty space. It was a second or two before they were even sufficiently aware of what had happened to throw their hands up over their horrified blinded eyes. In that second or two, they were aware of a tiny speck moving slowly across the eye of that sun.
They staggered back, and heard ringing in their ears the thin and unexpected chant of the robots crying out in unison.
"Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit!"
The sound chilled them. It was harsh, it was cold, it was empty, it was mechanically dismal.
It was also triumphant.
They were so stunned by these two sensory shocks that they almost missed the second historic event.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to survive a direct blast attack from the Krikkit robots, ran out of the Krikkit warship brandishing a Zap gun.
"Okay," he cried, "the situation is totally under control as of this moment in time."
The single robot guarding the hatchway to the ship silently swung his battleclub, and connected it with the back of Zaphod's left head.
"Who the zark did that?" said his left head, and lolled sickeningly forward.
His right head gazed keenly into the middle distance.
"Who did what?" it said.
The club connected with the back of his right head.
Zaphod measured his length and rather strange shape on the ground.
Within a matter of seconds the whole event was over. A few blasts from the robots were sufficient to destroy the Lock forever. It split and melted and splayed its contents brokenly, and robots marched grimly and, it almost seemed, in a slightly disheartened manner, back into their warship which, with a "foop," was gone.
Trillian and Ford ran hectically around and down the steep incline to the dark still body of Zaphod Beeblebrox.
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:49 pm
Chapter 26
"I don't know," said Zaphod, for what seemed to him like the thirty-seventh time, "they could have killed me, but they didn't. Maybe they just thought I was a kind of wonderful guy or something. I could understand that."
The others silently registered their opinions of this theory.
Zaphod lay on the cold floor of the flight deck. His back seemed to wrestle the floor as pain thudded through him and banged at his heads.
"I think," he whispered, "that there is something wrong with those anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird."
"They are programmed to kill everybody," Slartibartfast pointed out.
"That," wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, "could be it." He didn't seem altogether convinced.
"Hey, baby," he said to Trillian, hoping this would make up for his previous behavior.
"You all right?" she said gently.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm fine."
"Good," she said, and walked away to think. She stared at the huge visiscreen over the flight couches and, twisting a switch, she flipped local images over it. One image was the blankness of the Dust Cloud. One was the sun of Krikkit. One was Krikkit itself. She flipped between them fiercely.
"Well, that's goodbye Galaxy, then," said Arthur, slapping his knees and standing up.
"No," said Slartibartfast, gravely, "our course is clear." He furrowed his brow until you could grow some of the smaller root vegetables in it. He stood up, he paced around. When he spoke again, what he said frightened him so much he had to sit down again.
"We must go down to Krikkit," he said. A deep sigh shook his old frame and his eyes seemed almost to rattle in their sockets.
"Once again," he said, "we have failed pathetically. Quite pathetically."
"That," said Ford quietly, "is because we don't care enough. I told you."
He swung his feet up onto the instrument panel and picked fitfully at something on one of his fingernails.
"But unless we determine to take action," said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, "then we shall all be destroyed; we shall all die. Surely we care about that?"
"Not enough to want to get killed over it," said Ford. He put on a sort of hollow smile and flipped it round the room at anyone who wanted to see It.
Slartibartfast clearly found this point of view extremely seductive and he fought against it. He turned again to Zaphod, who was gritting his teeth and sweating with the pain.
"You surely must have some idea," he said, "of why they spared your life. It seems most strange and unusual."
"I kind of think they didn't even know," shrugged Zaphod. "I told you. They hit me with the most feeble blast, just knocked me out, right? They lugged me into their ship, dumped me in a corner and ignored me. Like they were embarrassed about me being there. If I said anything they knocked me out again. We had some great conversations. 'Hey ... ugh!' 'Hi there ... ugh!' 'I wonder ... ugh!' Kept me amused for hours, you know." He winced again.
He was toying with something in his fingers. He held it up. It was the Golden Bail -- the Heart of Gold, the heart of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Only that and the Wooden Pillar had survived the destruction of the Lock intact.
"I hear your ship can move a bit," he said, "so how would you like to zip me back to mine before you ..."
"Will you not help us?" said Slartibartfast.
"Us?" said Ford sharply; "who's us?"
"I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy," insisted Zaphod, raising himself up onto his shoulders, "but I have the mother and father of a pair of headaches, and I feel a lot of little headaches coming on. But next time it needs saving, I'm your guy. Hey, Trillian, baby?"
She looked round, briefly.
"Yes?"
"You want to come? Heart of Gold? Excitement and adventure and really wild things?"
"I'm going down to Krikkit," she said.
"I don't know," said Zaphod, for what seemed to him like the thirty-seventh time, "they could have killed me, but they didn't. Maybe they just thought I was a kind of wonderful guy or something. I could understand that."
The others silently registered their opinions of this theory.
Zaphod lay on the cold floor of the flight deck. His back seemed to wrestle the floor as pain thudded through him and banged at his heads.
"I think," he whispered, "that there is something wrong with those anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird."
"They are programmed to kill everybody," Slartibartfast pointed out.
"That," wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, "could be it." He didn't seem altogether convinced.
"Hey, baby," he said to Trillian, hoping this would make up for his previous behavior.
"You all right?" she said gently.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm fine."
"Good," she said, and walked away to think. She stared at the huge visiscreen over the flight couches and, twisting a switch, she flipped local images over it. One image was the blankness of the Dust Cloud. One was the sun of Krikkit. One was Krikkit itself. She flipped between them fiercely.
"Well, that's goodbye Galaxy, then," said Arthur, slapping his knees and standing up.
"No," said Slartibartfast, gravely, "our course is clear." He furrowed his brow until you could grow some of the smaller root vegetables in it. He stood up, he paced around. When he spoke again, what he said frightened him so much he had to sit down again.
"We must go down to Krikkit," he said. A deep sigh shook his old frame and his eyes seemed almost to rattle in their sockets.
"Once again," he said, "we have failed pathetically. Quite pathetically."
"That," said Ford quietly, "is because we don't care enough. I told you."
He swung his feet up onto the instrument panel and picked fitfully at something on one of his fingernails.
"But unless we determine to take action," said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, "then we shall all be destroyed; we shall all die. Surely we care about that?"
"Not enough to want to get killed over it," said Ford. He put on a sort of hollow smile and flipped it round the room at anyone who wanted to see It.
Slartibartfast clearly found this point of view extremely seductive and he fought against it. He turned again to Zaphod, who was gritting his teeth and sweating with the pain.
"You surely must have some idea," he said, "of why they spared your life. It seems most strange and unusual."
"I kind of think they didn't even know," shrugged Zaphod. "I told you. They hit me with the most feeble blast, just knocked me out, right? They lugged me into their ship, dumped me in a corner and ignored me. Like they were embarrassed about me being there. If I said anything they knocked me out again. We had some great conversations. 'Hey ... ugh!' 'Hi there ... ugh!' 'I wonder ... ugh!' Kept me amused for hours, you know." He winced again.
He was toying with something in his fingers. He held it up. It was the Golden Bail -- the Heart of Gold, the heart of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Only that and the Wooden Pillar had survived the destruction of the Lock intact.
"I hear your ship can move a bit," he said, "so how would you like to zip me back to mine before you ..."
"Will you not help us?" said Slartibartfast.
"Us?" said Ford sharply; "who's us?"
"I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy," insisted Zaphod, raising himself up onto his shoulders, "but I have the mother and father of a pair of headaches, and I feel a lot of little headaches coming on. But next time it needs saving, I'm your guy. Hey, Trillian, baby?"
She looked round, briefly.
"Yes?"
"You want to come? Heart of Gold? Excitement and adventure and really wild things?"
"I'm going down to Krikkit," she said.
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:49 pm
Chapter 27
It was the same hill, and yet not the same.
This time it was not an Informational Illusion. This was Krikkit itself and they were standing on it. Near them, behind the trees, the strange Italian restaurant that had brought these, their real bodies, to this, the real, present world of Krikkit.
The strong grass under their feet was real, the rich soil real, too. The heady fragrances from the tree, too, were real. The night was real night.
Krikkit.
Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy for anyone who isn't Krikkiter to stand. The place that could not countenance the existence of any other place, whose charming, delightful, intelligent inhabitants would howl with fear, savagery and murderous hate when confronted with anyone not their own.
Arthur shuddered.
Slartibartfast shuddered.
Ford, surprisingly, shuddered.
It was not surprising that he shuddered, it was surprising that he was there at all. But when they had returned Zaphod to his ship Ford had felt unexpectedly shamed into not running away.
"Wrong," he thought to himself, "wrong wrong wrong." He hugged to himself one of the Zap guns with which they had armed themselves out of Zaphod's armory.
Trillian shuddered, and frowned as she looked into the sky.
This, too, was not the same. It was no longer blank and empty. While the countryside around them had changed little in the two thousand years of the Krikkit Wars, and the mere five years that had elapsed locally since Krikkit was sealed in its Slo-Time envelope ten billion years ago, the sky was dramatically different.
Dim lights and heavy shapes hung in it.
High in the sky, where no Krikkiter ever looked, were the War Zones, the Robot Zones -- huge warships and tower blocks floating in the Nil-O-Grav fields far above the idyllic pastoral lands of the surface of Krikkit.
Trillian stared at them and thought.
"Trillian," whispered Ford Prefect to her.
"Yes?" she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Thinking."
"Do you always breathe like that when you're thinking?"
"I wasn't aware that I was breathing."
"That's what worried me."
"I think I know ..." said Trillian.
"Shhhh!" said Slartibartfast in alarm, and his thin trembling hand motioned them farther back beneath the shadow of the tree.
Suddenly, as before in the tape, there were lights coming along the hill path, but this time the dancing beams were not from lanterns but flashlights -- not in itself a dramatic change, but every detail made their hearts thump with fear. This time there were no lilting whimsical songs about flowers and farming and dead dogs, but hushed voices in urgent debate.
A light moved in the sky with slow weight. Arthur was clenched with a claustrophobic terror and the warm wind caught at his throat.
Within seconds a second party became visible, approaching from the other side of the dark hill. They were moving swiftly and purposefully, their flashlights swinging and probing around them.
The parties were clearly converging, and not merely with each other. They were converging deliberately on the spot where Arthur and the others were standing.
Arthur heard the slight rustle as Ford Prefect raised his Zap gun to his shoulder, and the slight whimpering cough as Slartibartfast raised his. He felt the cold unfamiliar weight of his own gun, and with shaking hands he raised it.
His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch and engage the extreme danger catch as Ford had shown him. He was shaking so much that if he'd fired at anybody at that moment he probably would have burnt his signature on them.
Only Trillian didn't raise her gun. She raised her eyebrows, lowered them again and bit her lip in thought.
"Has it occurred to you ..." she began, but nobody wanted to discuss anything much at the moment.
A light stabbed through the darkness from behind them and they spun around to find a third party of Krikkiters behind them, searching them out with their flashlights.
Ford Prefect's gun crackled viciously, but fire spat back at it and it crashed from his hands.
There was a moment of pure fear, a frozen second before anyone fired again.
And at the end of the second nobody fired.
They were surrounded by pale-faced Krikkiters and bathed in bobbing light.
The captives stared at their captors, the captors stared at their captives.
"Hello," said one of the captors, "excuse me, but are you ... aliens?"
It was the same hill, and yet not the same.
This time it was not an Informational Illusion. This was Krikkit itself and they were standing on it. Near them, behind the trees, the strange Italian restaurant that had brought these, their real bodies, to this, the real, present world of Krikkit.
The strong grass under their feet was real, the rich soil real, too. The heady fragrances from the tree, too, were real. The night was real night.
Krikkit.
Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy for anyone who isn't Krikkiter to stand. The place that could not countenance the existence of any other place, whose charming, delightful, intelligent inhabitants would howl with fear, savagery and murderous hate when confronted with anyone not their own.
Arthur shuddered.
Slartibartfast shuddered.
Ford, surprisingly, shuddered.
It was not surprising that he shuddered, it was surprising that he was there at all. But when they had returned Zaphod to his ship Ford had felt unexpectedly shamed into not running away.
"Wrong," he thought to himself, "wrong wrong wrong." He hugged to himself one of the Zap guns with which they had armed themselves out of Zaphod's armory.
Trillian shuddered, and frowned as she looked into the sky.
This, too, was not the same. It was no longer blank and empty. While the countryside around them had changed little in the two thousand years of the Krikkit Wars, and the mere five years that had elapsed locally since Krikkit was sealed in its Slo-Time envelope ten billion years ago, the sky was dramatically different.
Dim lights and heavy shapes hung in it.
High in the sky, where no Krikkiter ever looked, were the War Zones, the Robot Zones -- huge warships and tower blocks floating in the Nil-O-Grav fields far above the idyllic pastoral lands of the surface of Krikkit.
Trillian stared at them and thought.
"Trillian," whispered Ford Prefect to her.
"Yes?" she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Thinking."
"Do you always breathe like that when you're thinking?"
"I wasn't aware that I was breathing."
"That's what worried me."
"I think I know ..." said Trillian.
"Shhhh!" said Slartibartfast in alarm, and his thin trembling hand motioned them farther back beneath the shadow of the tree.
Suddenly, as before in the tape, there were lights coming along the hill path, but this time the dancing beams were not from lanterns but flashlights -- not in itself a dramatic change, but every detail made their hearts thump with fear. This time there were no lilting whimsical songs about flowers and farming and dead dogs, but hushed voices in urgent debate.
A light moved in the sky with slow weight. Arthur was clenched with a claustrophobic terror and the warm wind caught at his throat.
Within seconds a second party became visible, approaching from the other side of the dark hill. They were moving swiftly and purposefully, their flashlights swinging and probing around them.
The parties were clearly converging, and not merely with each other. They were converging deliberately on the spot where Arthur and the others were standing.
Arthur heard the slight rustle as Ford Prefect raised his Zap gun to his shoulder, and the slight whimpering cough as Slartibartfast raised his. He felt the cold unfamiliar weight of his own gun, and with shaking hands he raised it.
His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch and engage the extreme danger catch as Ford had shown him. He was shaking so much that if he'd fired at anybody at that moment he probably would have burnt his signature on them.
Only Trillian didn't raise her gun. She raised her eyebrows, lowered them again and bit her lip in thought.
"Has it occurred to you ..." she began, but nobody wanted to discuss anything much at the moment.
A light stabbed through the darkness from behind them and they spun around to find a third party of Krikkiters behind them, searching them out with their flashlights.
Ford Prefect's gun crackled viciously, but fire spat back at it and it crashed from his hands.
There was a moment of pure fear, a frozen second before anyone fired again.
And at the end of the second nobody fired.
They were surrounded by pale-faced Krikkiters and bathed in bobbing light.
The captives stared at their captors, the captors stared at their captives.
"Hello," said one of the captors, "excuse me, but are you ... aliens?"
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:49 pm
Chapter 28
Meanwhile, more millions of miles away than the mind can comfortably encompass, Zaphod Beeblebrox was feeling bored.
He had repaired his ship -- that is, he'd watched with alert interest while a service robot had repaired it for him. It was now, once again, one of the most powerful and extraordinary ships in existence. He could go anywhere, do anything. He fiddled with a book, and then tossed it away. It was the one he'd read before.
He walked over to the communications bank and opened an all frequencies emergency channel.
"Anyone want a drink?" he asked.
"This an emergency, feller?" crackled a voice from halfway across the Galaxy.
"Got any mixers?" said Zaphod.
"Go take a ride on a comet."
"Okay, okay," said Zaphod, and flipped the channel shut again. He sighed and sat down. He got up again and wandered over to a computer screen. He pushed a few buttons. Little blobs started to rush around the screen eating each other.
"Pow!" said Zaphod, "freeeoooo! Pop pop pop!"
"Hi there," said the computer brightly after a minute of this, "you have scored three points. Previous best score, seven million five hundred and ninety-seven thousand, two hundred and ..."
"Okay, okay," said Zaphod, and flipped the screen blank again.
He sat down again. He played with a pencil. This, too, began slowly to lose its fascination.
"Okay, okay," he said, and fed his score and the previous best one into the computer.
His ship made a blur of the Universe.
Meanwhile, more millions of miles away than the mind can comfortably encompass, Zaphod Beeblebrox was feeling bored.
He had repaired his ship -- that is, he'd watched with alert interest while a service robot had repaired it for him. It was now, once again, one of the most powerful and extraordinary ships in existence. He could go anywhere, do anything. He fiddled with a book, and then tossed it away. It was the one he'd read before.
He walked over to the communications bank and opened an all frequencies emergency channel.
"Anyone want a drink?" he asked.
"This an emergency, feller?" crackled a voice from halfway across the Galaxy.
"Got any mixers?" said Zaphod.
"Go take a ride on a comet."
"Okay, okay," said Zaphod, and flipped the channel shut again. He sighed and sat down. He got up again and wandered over to a computer screen. He pushed a few buttons. Little blobs started to rush around the screen eating each other.
"Pow!" said Zaphod, "freeeoooo! Pop pop pop!"
"Hi there," said the computer brightly after a minute of this, "you have scored three points. Previous best score, seven million five hundred and ninety-seven thousand, two hundred and ..."
"Okay, okay," said Zaphod, and flipped the screen blank again.
He sat down again. He played with a pencil. This, too, began slowly to lose its fascination.
"Okay, okay," he said, and fed his score and the previous best one into the computer.
His ship made a blur of the Universe.
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Re: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Douglas Adams
by admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 9:50 pm
Chapter 29
"Tell us," said the thin, pale-faced Krikkiter who had stepped forward from the ranks of the others and stood uncertainly in the circle of light handling his gun as if he were just holding it for someone else who'd just popped off somewhere but would be back in a minute, " do you know anything about something called the balance of nature?"
There was no reply from their captives, or at least nothing more articulate than a few confused mumbles and grunts. The flashlight continued to play over them. High in the sky above them dark activity continued in the Robot Zones.
"It's just," continued the Krikkiter uneasily, "something we heard about, probably nothing important. Well, I suppose we'd better kill you, then."
He looked down at his gun as if he were trying to find which bit to press.
"That is," he said, looking up again, "unless there's anything you want to chat about?"
Slow numb astonishment crept up the bodies of Slartibartfast, Ford and Arthur. Very soon it would reach their brains, which were at the moment solidly occupied with moving their jawbones up and down. Trillian was shaking her head as if trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle by shaking the box.
"We're worried, you see," said another man from the crowd, "about this plan of universal destruction."
"Yes," added another, "and the balance of nature. It just seemed to us that if the whole of the rest of the Universe is destroyed it will somehow upset the balance. We're quite keen on ecology, you see." His voice trailed away unhappily.
"And sport," said another, loudly. This got a cheer of approval from the others.
"Yes," agreed the first, "and sport ..." He looked back at his fellows uneasily and scratched fitfully at his cheek. He seemed to be wrestling with some deep inner confusion, as if everything he wanted to say and everything he thought were entirely different things between which he could see no possible connection.
"You see," he mumbled, "some of us ..." and he looked around again as if for confirmation. The others made encouraging noises. "Some of us," he continued, "are quite keen to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy, and though I can see the argument about keeping sport out of politics, I think that if we want to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy, which we do, then it's probably a mistake to destroy it. And indeed the rest of the Universe ... His voice trailed away again, "which is what seems to be the idea now ..."
"Wh ..." said Slartibartfast, "wh ..."
"Hhhh ...?" said Arthur.
"Dr. .." said Ford Prefect.
"Okay," said Trillian, "let's talk about it." She walked forward and took the poor confused Krikkiter by the arm. He looked about twenty-five, which meant, because of the peculiar manglings of time that had been going on in this area, that he would have been just twenty when the Krikkit Wars were finished, ten billion years ago.
Trillian led him for a short walk through the light before she said anything more. He stumbled uncertainly after her. The encircling flashlight beams were drooping slightly now as if they were abdicating to this strange, quiet girl who alone in this Universe of dark confusion seemed to know what she was doing.
She turned and faced him, and lightly held both his arms. He was a picture of bewildered misery.
"Tell me," she said.
He said nothing for a moment, while his gaze darted from one of her eyes to the other.
"We ..." he said, "we have to be alone ... I think." He screwed up his face and then dropped his head forward, shaking it like someone trying to shake a coin out of a money box. He looked up again. "We have this bomb now, you see," he said, "it's just a little one."
"I know," she said.
He goggled at her as if she'd said something very strange about beetroots.
"Honestly," he said, "it's very, very little."
"I know," she said again.
"But they say," his voice trailed on, "they say it can destroy everything that exists. And we have to do that, you see, I think. Will that make us alone? I don't know. It seems to be our function, though," he said, and dropped his head again.
"Whatever that means," said a hollow voice from the crowd.
Trillian slowly put her arms around the poor bewildered young Krikkiter and patted his trembling head on her shoulder.
"It's all right," she said quietly, but clearly enough for all the shadowy crowd to hear, "you don't have to do it."
She rocked him.
"You don't have to do it," she said again.
She let him go and stood back.
"I want you to do something for me," she said, and unexpectedly laughed.
"I want," she said, and laughed again. She put her hand over her mouth and then said, with a straight face, "I want you to take me to your leader," and she pointed into the War Zones in the sky. She seemed somehow to know that their leader would be there.
Her laughter seemed to discharge something in the atmosphere. From somewhere at the back of the crowd a single voice started to sing a tune that would have enabled Paul McCartney, had he written it, to buy the world.
"Tell us," said the thin, pale-faced Krikkiter who had stepped forward from the ranks of the others and stood uncertainly in the circle of light handling his gun as if he were just holding it for someone else who'd just popped off somewhere but would be back in a minute, " do you know anything about something called the balance of nature?"
There was no reply from their captives, or at least nothing more articulate than a few confused mumbles and grunts. The flashlight continued to play over them. High in the sky above them dark activity continued in the Robot Zones.
"It's just," continued the Krikkiter uneasily, "something we heard about, probably nothing important. Well, I suppose we'd better kill you, then."
He looked down at his gun as if he were trying to find which bit to press.
"That is," he said, looking up again, "unless there's anything you want to chat about?"
Slow numb astonishment crept up the bodies of Slartibartfast, Ford and Arthur. Very soon it would reach their brains, which were at the moment solidly occupied with moving their jawbones up and down. Trillian was shaking her head as if trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle by shaking the box.
"We're worried, you see," said another man from the crowd, "about this plan of universal destruction."
"Yes," added another, "and the balance of nature. It just seemed to us that if the whole of the rest of the Universe is destroyed it will somehow upset the balance. We're quite keen on ecology, you see." His voice trailed away unhappily.
"And sport," said another, loudly. This got a cheer of approval from the others.
"Yes," agreed the first, "and sport ..." He looked back at his fellows uneasily and scratched fitfully at his cheek. He seemed to be wrestling with some deep inner confusion, as if everything he wanted to say and everything he thought were entirely different things between which he could see no possible connection.
"You see," he mumbled, "some of us ..." and he looked around again as if for confirmation. The others made encouraging noises. "Some of us," he continued, "are quite keen to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy, and though I can see the argument about keeping sport out of politics, I think that if we want to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy, which we do, then it's probably a mistake to destroy it. And indeed the rest of the Universe ... His voice trailed away again, "which is what seems to be the idea now ..."
"Wh ..." said Slartibartfast, "wh ..."
"Hhhh ...?" said Arthur.
"Dr. .." said Ford Prefect.
"Okay," said Trillian, "let's talk about it." She walked forward and took the poor confused Krikkiter by the arm. He looked about twenty-five, which meant, because of the peculiar manglings of time that had been going on in this area, that he would have been just twenty when the Krikkit Wars were finished, ten billion years ago.
Trillian led him for a short walk through the light before she said anything more. He stumbled uncertainly after her. The encircling flashlight beams were drooping slightly now as if they were abdicating to this strange, quiet girl who alone in this Universe of dark confusion seemed to know what she was doing.
She turned and faced him, and lightly held both his arms. He was a picture of bewildered misery.
"Tell me," she said.
He said nothing for a moment, while his gaze darted from one of her eyes to the other.
"We ..." he said, "we have to be alone ... I think." He screwed up his face and then dropped his head forward, shaking it like someone trying to shake a coin out of a money box. He looked up again. "We have this bomb now, you see," he said, "it's just a little one."
"I know," she said.
He goggled at her as if she'd said something very strange about beetroots.
"Honestly," he said, "it's very, very little."
"I know," she said again.
"But they say," his voice trailed on, "they say it can destroy everything that exists. And we have to do that, you see, I think. Will that make us alone? I don't know. It seems to be our function, though," he said, and dropped his head again.
"Whatever that means," said a hollow voice from the crowd.
Trillian slowly put her arms around the poor bewildered young Krikkiter and patted his trembling head on her shoulder.
"It's all right," she said quietly, but clearly enough for all the shadowy crowd to hear, "you don't have to do it."
She rocked him.
"You don't have to do it," she said again.
She let him go and stood back.
"I want you to do something for me," she said, and unexpectedly laughed.
"I want," she said, and laughed again. She put her hand over her mouth and then said, with a straight face, "I want you to take me to your leader," and she pointed into the War Zones in the sky. She seemed somehow to know that their leader would be there.
Her laughter seemed to discharge something in the atmosphere. From somewhere at the back of the crowd a single voice started to sing a tune that would have enabled Paul McCartney, had he written it, to buy the world.
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