ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Life, the Universe

  attention to his ancient history lessons and less to his organic being, he

  might have been more impressed by this honour.

  The robot's voice was like its body, cold, sleek and lifeless. It had

  almost a cultured rasp to it. It sounded as ancient as it was.

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

  Zaphod didn't know what it meant for a moment, but then he glanced down at

  his own hand and was relieved to see that what he had found clipped to a wall

  bracket was indeed what he had thought it was.

  "Yeah," he said in a kind of relieved sneer, which is quite tricky, "well,

  I wouldn't want to overtax your imagination, robot." For a while nobody said

  anything, and Zaphod realized that the robots were obviously not here to make

  conversation, and that it was up to him.

  "I can't help noticing that you have parked your ship," he said with a nod

  of one of his heads in the appropriate direction, "through mine."

  There was no denying this. Without regard for any kind of proper

  dimensional behaviour they had simply materialized their ship precisely where

  they wanted it to be, which meant that it was simply locked through the Heart

  of Gold as if they were nothing more than two combs.

  Again, they made no response to this, and Zaphod wondered if the

  conversation would gather any momentum if he phrased his part of it in the

  form of questions.

  "... haven't you?" he added.

  "Yes," replied the robot."

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

  Silence.

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

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

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

  seemed to understand this.

  "The Gold Bail is part of the Key we seek," continued the robot, "to

  release our Masters from Krikkit."

  Zaphod nodded again. He waggled his gun again.

  "The Key," continued the robot simply, "was disintegrated in time and

  space. The Golden Bail is embedded in the device which drives your ship. It

  will be reconstituted in the Key. Our Masters shall be released. The Universal

  Readjustment will continue."

  Zaphod nodded again.

  "What are you talking about?" he said.

  A slightly pained expression seemed to cross the robot's totally

  expressionless face. He seemed to be finding the conversation depressing.

  "Obliteration," it said. "We seek the Key," it repeated, "we already have

  the Wooden Pillar, the Steel Pillar and the Perspex Pillar. In a moment we

  will have the Gold Bail ..."

  "No you won't."

  "We will," stated the robot.

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

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

  ..."

  "You will not," said Zaphod.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  down.

  Chapter 12

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

  Night had now fallen on ancient Krikkit. The sky was dark and empty. The

  only light was coming from the nearby town, from which pleasant convivial

  sounds were drifting quietly on the breeze. They stood beneath a tree from

  which heady fragrances wafted around them. Arthur squatted and felt the

  Informational Illusion of the soil and the grass. He ran it through his

  fingers. The soil seemed heavy and rich, the grass strong. It was hard to

  avoid the impression that this was a thoroughly delightful place in all

  respects.

  The sky was, however, extremely blank and seemed to Arthur to cast a

  certain chill over the otherwise idyllic, if currently invisible, landscape.

  Still, he supposed, it's a question of what you're used to.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder and looked up. Slartibartfast was quietly

  directing his attention to something down the other side of the hill. He

  looked and could just see some faint lights dancing and waving, and moving

  slowly in their direction.

  As they came nearer, sounds became audible too, and soon the dim lights

  and noises resolved themselves into a small group of people who were walking

  home across the hill towards the town.

  They walked quite near the watchers beneath the tree, swinging lanterns

  which made soft and crazy lights dance among the trees and grass, chattering

  contentedly, and actually singing a song about how terribly nice everything

  was, how happy they were, how much they enjoyed working on the farm, and how

  pleasant it was to be going home to see their wives and children, with a

  lilting chorus to the effect that the flowers were smelling particularly nice

  at this time of year and that it was a pity the dog had died seeing as it

  liked them so much. Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney sitting with

  his feet up by the fire on evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to

  buy with the proceeds, and thinking probably Essex.

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

  Coming, as it did, so hard upon the heels of his own thoughts about Essex

  this remark caused Arthur a moment's confusion. Then the logic of the

  situation imposed itself on his scattered mind, and he discovered that he

  still didn't understand what the old man meant.

  "What?" he said.

  "The Masters of Krikkit," said Slartibartfast again, and if his breathing

  had been sepulchral before, this time he sounded like someone in Hades with

  bronchitis.

  Arthur peered at the group and tried to make sense of what little

  information he had at his disposal at this point.

  The people in the group were clearly alien, if only because they seemed a

  little tall, thin, angular and almost as pale as to be white, but otherwise

  they appeared remarkably pleasant; a little whimsical perhaps, one wouldn't

  necessarily want to spend a long coach journey with them, but the point was

  that if they deviated in any way from being good straightforward people it was

  in being perhaps too nice rather than not nice enough. So why all this rasping

  lungwork from Slartibartfast which would seem more appropriate to a radio

  commercial for one of those nasty films about chainsaw operators taking their

  work home with them?

  Then, this Krikkit angle was a tough one, too. He hadn't quite fathomed

  the connection between what he knew as cricket, and what ...

  Slartibartfast interrupted his train of thought at this point as if

  sensing what was going through his mind.

  "The game you know as cricket," he said, and his voice still seemed to be

  wandering lost in subterranean passages, "is just one of those curious freaks

  of racial memory which can keep images alive in the mind aeons after their

  true significance has been lost in the mists of time. Of all the races on the

  Galaxy, only the English could poss
ibly revive the memory of the most horrific

  wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I'm afraid is

  generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.

  "Rather fond of it myself," he added, "but in most people's eyes you have

  been inadvertently guilty of the most grotesque bad taste. Particularly the

  bit about the little red ball hitting the wicket, that's very nasty."

  "Um," said Arthur with a reflective frown to indicate that his cognitive

  synapses were coping with this as best as they could, "um."

  "And these," said Slartibartfast, slipping back into crypt guttural and

  indicating the group of Krikkit men who had now walked past them, "are the

  ones who started it all, and it will start tonight. Come, we will follow, and

  see why."

  They slipped out from underneath the tree, and followed the cheery party

  along the dark hill path. Their natural instinct was to tread quietly and

  stealthily in pursuit of their quarry, though, as they were simply walking

  through a recorded Informational Illusion, they could as easily have been

  wearing euphoniums and woad for all the notice their quarry would have taken

  of them.

  Arthur noticed that a couple of members of the party were now singing a

  different song. It came lilting back to them through the soft night air, and

  was a sweet romantic ballad which would have netted McCartney Kent and Sussex

  and enabled him to put in a fair offer for Hampshire.

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

  about to happen?"

  "Me?" said Ford. "No."

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

  "I was in the cybercubicle behind Zaphod," said Ford, "it was very

  distracting. Which isn't to say that I didn't learn some pretty stunning

  things."

  At this point Arthur noticed a curious feature to the song that the party

  were singing. The middle eight bridge, which would have had McCartney firmly

  consolidated in Winchester and gazing intently over the Test Valley to the

  rich pickings of the New Forest beyond, had some curious lyrics. The

  songwriter was referring to meeting with a girl not "under the moon" or

  "beneath the stars" but "above the grass", which struck Arthur a little

  prosaic. Then he looked up again at the bewildering black sky, and had the

  distinct feeling that there was an important point here, if only he could

  grasp what it was. It gave him a feeling of being alone in the Universe, and

  he said so.

  "No," said Slartibartfast, with a slight quickening of his step, "the

  people of Krikkit have never thought to themselves `We are alone in the

  Universe.' They are surrounded by a huge Dust Cloud, you see, their single sun

  with its single world, and they are right out on the utmost eastern edge of

  the Galaxy. Because of the Dust Cloud there has never been anything to see in

  the sky. At night it is totally blank, During the day there is the sun, but

  you can't look directly at that so they don't. They are hardly aware of the

  sky. It's as if they had a blind spot which extended 180 degrees from horizon

  to horizon.

  "You see, the reason why they have never thought `We are alone in the

  Universe' is that until tonight they don't know about the Universe. Until

  tonight."

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

  "Imagine," he said, "never even thinking `We are alone' simply because it

  has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be."

  He moved on again.

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

  As he spoke, they became aware of a very thin roaring scream high up in

  the sightless sky above them. They glanced upwards in alarm, but for a moment

  or two could see nothing.

  Then Arthur noticed that the people in the party in front of them had

  heard the noise, but that none of them seemed to know what to so with it. They

  were glancing around themselves in consternation, left, right, forwards,

  backwards, even at the ground. It never occurred to them to look upwards.

  The profoundness of the shock and horror they emanated a few moments later

  when the burning wreckage of a spaceship came hurtling and screaming out of

  the sky and crashed about half a mile from where they were standing was

  something that you had to be there to experience.

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

  Bistromath.

  Many speak of the legendary and gigantic Starship Titanic, a majestic and

  luxurious cruise-liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes

  of Artifactovol some hundreds of years ago now, and with good reason.

  It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge, and more pleasantly

  equipped than any ship in what now remains of history (see note below on the

  Campaign for Real Time) but it had the misfortune to be built in the very

  earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cussed

  branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood.

  The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a

  prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure

  that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any

  part of the ship.

  They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular

  nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely

  Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately.

  The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like

  a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale amongst the laserlit tracery of its

  construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against

  the deep interstellar blackness; but when launched, it did not even manage to

  complete its very first radio message - an SOS - before undergoing a sudden

  and gratuitous total existence failure.

  However, the same event which saw the disastrous failure of one science in

  its infancy also witnessed the apotheosis of another. It was conclusively

  proven that more people watched the tri-d coverage of the launch than actually

  existed at the time, and this has now been recognized as the greatest

  achievement ever in the science of audience research.

  Another spectacular media event of that time was the supernova which the

  star Ysllodins underwent a few hours later. Ysllodins is the star around which

  most of the Galaxy's major insurance underwriters live, or rather lived.

  But whilst these spaceships, and other great ones which come to mind, such

  as the Galactic Fleet Battleships - the GSS Daring, the GSS Audacy and the GSS

  Suicidal Insanity - are all spoken of with awe, pride, enthusiasm, affection,

  admiration, regret, jealousy, resentment, in fact most of the better known

  emotions, the one which regularly commands the most actual astonishment was

  Krikkit One, the first spaceship ever built by the people of Krikkit. This is

  not because it was a wonderful ship. It wasn't.

  It was a crazy piece of near junk. It looked as if it had been knocked up

  in somebody's backyard, and this was in fact precisely
where it had been

  knocked up. The astonishing thing about the ship was not that it was one well

  (it wasn't) but that it was done at all. The period of time which had elapsed

  between the moment that the people of Krikkit had discovered that there was

  such a thing as space and the launching of their first spaceship was almost

  exactly a year.

  Ford Prefect was extremely grateful, as he strapped himself in, that this

  was just another Informational Illusion, and that he was therefore completely

  safe. In real life it wasn't a ship he would have set foot in for all the rice

  wine in China. "Extremely rickety" was one phrase which sprang to mind, and

  "Please may I get out?" was another.

  "This is going to fly?" said Arthur, giving gaunt looks, at the lashed+

  together pipework and wiring which festooned the cramped interior of the ship.

  Slartibartfast assured him that it would, that they were perfectly safe

  and that it was all going to be extremely instructive and not a little

  harrowing.

  Ford and Arthur decided just to relax and be harrowed.

  "Why not," said Ford, "go mad?"

  In front of them and, of course, totally unaware of their presence for the

  very good reason that they weren't actually there, were the three pilots. They

  had also constructed the ship. They had been on the hill path that night

  singing wholesome heartwarming songs. Their brains had been very slightly

  turned by the nearby crash of the alien spaceship. They had spent weeks

  stripping every tiniest last secret out of the wreckage of that burnt-up

  spaceship, all the while singing lilting spaceshipstripping ditties. They had

  then built their own ship and this was it. This was their ship, and they were

  currently singing a little song about that too, expressing the twin joys of

  achievement and ownership. The chorus was a little poignant, and told of their

  sorrow that their work had kept them such long hours in the garage, away from

  the company of their wives and children, who had missed them terribly but had

  kept them cheerful by bringing them continual stories of how nicely the puppy

  was growing up.

  Pow, they took off.

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

  doing.

  "No way," said Ford a while later after they had recovered from the shock

  of acceleration, and were climbing up out of the planet's atmosphere, "no