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Chapter 26

“I don’t know,” said Zaphod, for what seemed to him like the thirty+ seventh time, “they could have killed me, but they didn’t. Maybe they just thought I was a kind of wonderful guy or something. I could understand that.” The others silently registered their opinions of this theory. Zaphod lay on the cold floor of the flight deck. His back seemed to wrestle the floor as pain thudded through him and banged at his heads. “I think,” he whispered, “that there is something wrong with those anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird.” “They are programmed to kill everybody,” Slartibartfast pointed out. “That,” wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, “could be it.” He didn’t seem altogether convinced. “Hey, baby,” he said to Trillian, hoping this would make up for his previous behaviour. “You all right?” she said gently. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m fine.” “Good,” she said, and walked away to think. She stared at the huge visiscreen over the flight couches and, twisting a switch, she flipped local images over it. One image was the blankness of the Dust Cloud. One was the sun of Krikkit. One was Krikkit itself. She flipped between them fiercely. “Well, that’s goodbye Galaxy, then,” said Arthur, slapping his knees and standing up. “No,” said Slartibartfast, gravely. “Our course is clear.” He furrowed his brow until you could grow some of the smaller root vegetables in it. He stood up, he paced around. When he spoke again, what he said frightened him so much he had to sit down again. “We must go down to Krikkit,” he said. A deep sigh shook his old frame and his eyes seemed almost to rattle in their sockets. “Once again,” he said, “we have failed pathetically. Quite pathetically.” “That,” said Ford quietly, “is because we don’t care enough. I told you.” He swung his feet up on the instrument panel and picked fitfully at something on one of his fingernails. “But unless we determine to take action,” said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, “then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?” “Not enough to want to get killed over it,” said Ford. He put on a sort of hollow smile and flipped it round the room at anyone who wanted to see it. Slartibartfast clearly found this point of view extremely seductive and he fought against it. He turned again to Zaphod who was gritting his teeth and sweating with the pain. “You surely must have some idea,” he said, “of why they spared your life. It seems most strange and unusual.” “I kind of think they didn’t even know,” shrugged Zaphod. “I told you. They hit me with the most feeble blast, just knocked me out, right? They lugged me into their ship, dumped me into a corner and ignored me. Like they were embarrassed about me being there. If I said anything they knocked me out again. We had some great conversations. `Hey … ugh!’ `Hi there … ugh!’ `I wonder …ugh!’ Kept me amused for hours, you know.” He winced again. He was toying with something in his fingers. He held it up. It was the Gold Bail – the Heart of Gold, the heart of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Only that and the Wooden Pillar had survived the destruction of the Lock intact. “I hear your ship can move a bit,” he said. “So how would you like to zip me back to mine before you …” “Will you not help us?” said Slartibartfast. “I’d love to stay and help you save the Galaxy,” insisted Zaphod, rising himself up on to his shoulders, “but I have the mother and father of a pair of headaches, and I feel a lot of little headaches coming on. But next time it needs saving, I’m your guy. Hey, Trillian baby?” She looked round briefly. “Yes?” “You want to come? Heart of Gold? Excitement and adventure and really wild things?” “I’m going down to Krikkit,” she said.

Chapter 27

It was the same hill, and yet not the same. This time it was not an Informational Illusion. This was Krikkit itself and they were standing on it. Near them, behind the trees, stood the strange Italian restaurant which had brought these, their real bodies, to this, the real, present world of Krikkit. The strong grass under their feet was real, the rich soil real too. The heady fragrances from the tree, too, were real. The night was real night. Krikkit. Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy for anyone who isn’t a Krikkiter to stand. The place that could not countenance the existence of any other place, whose charming, delightful, intelligent inhabitants would howl with fear, savagery and murderous hate when confronted with anyone not their own. Arthur shuddered. Slartibartfast shuddered. Ford, surprisingly, shuddered. It was not surprising that he shuddered, it was surprising that he was there at all. But when they had returned Zaphod to his ship Ford had felt unexpectedly shamed into not running away. Wrong, he thought to himself, wrong wrong wrong. He hugged to himself one of the Zap guns with which they had armed themselves out of Zaphod’s armoury. Trillian shuddered, and frowned as she looked into the sky. This, too, was not the same. It was no longer blank and empty. Whilst the countryside around them had changed little in the two thousand years of the Krikkit wars, and the mere five years that had elapsed locally since Krikkit was sealed in its Slo-Time envelope ten billion years ago, the sky was dramatically different. Dim lights and heavy shapes hung in it. High in the sky, where no Krikkiter ever looked, were the War Zones, the Robot Zones – huge warships and tower blocks floating in the Nil-O-Grav fields far above the idyllic pastoral lands of the surface of Krikkit. Trillian stared at them and thought. “Trillian,” whispered Ford Prefect to her. “Yes?” she said. “What are you doing?” “Thinking.” “Do you always breathe like that when you’re thinking?” “I wasn’t aware that I was breathing.” “That’s what worried me.” “I think I know …” said Trillian. “Shhhh!” said Slartibartfast in alarm, and his thin trembling hand motioned them further back beneath the shadow of the tree. Suddenly, as before in the tape, there were lights coming along the hill path, but this time the dancing beams were not from lanterns but electric torches – not in itself a dramatic change, but every detail made their hearts thump with fear. This time there were no lilting whimsical songs about flowers and farming and dead dogs, but hushed voices in urgent debate. A light moved in the sky with slow weight. Arthur was clenched with a claustrophobic terror and the warm wind caught at his throat. Within seconds a second party became visible, approaching from the other side of the dark hill. They were moving swiftly and purposefully, their torches swinging and probing around them. The parties were clearly converging, and not merely with each other. They were converging deliberately on the spot where Arthur and the others were standing. Arthur heard the slight rustle as Ford Prefect raised his Zap gun to his shoulder, and the slight whimpering cough as Slartibartfast raised his. He felt the cold unfamiliar weight of his own gun, and with shaking hands he raised it. His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch and engage the extreme danger catch as Ford had shown him. He was shaking so much that if he’d fired at anybody at that moment he probably would have burnt his signature on them. Only Trillian didn’t raise her gun. She raised her eyebrows, lowered them again, and bit her lip in thought. “Has it occurred to you,” she began, but nobody wanted to discuss anything much at the moment. A light stabbed through the darkness from behind them and they span around to find a third party of Krikkiters behind them, searching them out with their torches. Ford Prefect’s gun crackled viciously, but fire spat back at it and it crashed from his hands. There was a moment of pure fear, a frozen second before anyone fired again. And at the end of the second nobody fired. They were surrounded by pale-faced Krikkiters and bathed in bobbing torch light. The captives stared at their captors, the captors stared at their captives. “Hello?” said one of the captors. “Excuse me, but are you … aliens?”

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