The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  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.

  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, h
e 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.

  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?”

  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.

  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 solely 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.”