ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Life, the Universe

  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?"

  Chapter 28

  Meanwhile, more millions of miles away than the mind can comfortably

  encompass, Zaphod Beeblebrox was throwing a mood again.

  He had repaired his ship - that is, he'd watched with alert interest

  whilst 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 allfrequencies

  emergency channel.

  "Anyone want a drink?" he said.

  "This an emergency, feller?" crackled a voice from halfway across the

  Galaxy.

  "Got any mixers?" said Zaphod.

  "Go take a ride on a comet."

  "OK, OK," 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 ..."

  "OK, OK," 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.

  "OK, OK," he said, and fed his score and the previous 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

  torchlight, handling his gun as if he was 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 torchlight 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 was 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 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 of nature. 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.

  "OK," 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 torchlight before she said

  anything more. He stumbled uncertainly after her. The encircling torch beams

  were drooping now slightly as if they were abdicating to this strange, quiet

  girl who alone in the 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, whilst 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 loo
ked 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 which

  would have enabled Paul McCartney, had he written it, to buy the world.

  Chapter 30

  Zaphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like the hell of a guy

  he was. He was very confused, but continued crawling doggedly anyway because

  he was that brave.

  He was confused by something he had just seen, but not half as confused as

  he was going to be by something he was about to hear, so it would now be best

  to explain exactly where he was.

  He was in the Robot War Zones many miles above the surface of the planet

  Krikkit.

  The atmosphere was thin here and relatively unprotected from any rays or

  anything which space might care to hurl in his direction.

  He had parked the starship Heart of Gold amongst the huge jostling dim

  hulks that crowded the sky here above Krikkit, and had entered what appeared

  to be the biggest and most important of the sky buildings, armed with nothing

  but a Zap gun and something for his headaches.

  He had found himself in a long, wide and badly lit corridor in which he

  was able to hide until he worked out what he was going to do next. He hid

  because every now and then one of the Krikkit robots would walk along it, and

  although he had so far led some kind of charmed life at their hands, it had

  nevertheless been an extremely painful one, and he had no desire to stretch

  what he was only half-inclined to call his good fortune.

  He had ducked, at one point, into a room leading off the corridor, and had

  discovered it to be a huge and, again, dimly lit chamber.

  In fact, it was a museum with just one exhibit - the wreckage of a

  spacecraft. It was terribly burnt and mangled, and, now that he had caught up

  with some of the Galactic history he had missed through his failed attempts to

  have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him at school, he was able

  to put in an intelligent guess that this was the wrecked spaceship which had

  drifted through the Dust Cloud all those billions of years ago and started the

  whole business off.

  But, and this is where he had become confused, there was something not at

  all right about it.

  It was genuinely wrecked. It was genuinely burnt, but a fairly brief

  inspection by an experienced eye revealed that it was not a genuine

  spacecraft. It was as if it was a full-scale model of one - a solid blueprint.

  In other words it was a very useful thing to have around if you suddenly

  decided to build a spaceship yourself and didn't know how to do it. It was

  not, however, anything that would ever fly anywhere itself.

  He was still puzzling over this - in fact he'd only just started to puzzle

  over it - when he became aware that a door had slid open in another part of

  the chamber, and another couple of Krikkit robots had entered, looking a

  little glum.

  Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as

  discretion was the better part of valour so was cowardice the better part of

  discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a cupboard.

  The cupboard in fact turned out to be the top part of a shaft which led

  down through an inspection hatch into a wide ventilation tunnel. He led

  himself down into it and started to crawl along it, which is where we found

  him.

  He didn't like it. It was cold, dark and profoundly uncomfortable, and it

  frightened him. At the first opportunity - which was another shaft a hundred

  yards further along - he climbed back up out of it.

  This time he emerged into a smaller chamber, which appeared to be a

  computer intelligence centre. He emerged in a dark narrow space between a

  large computer bank and the wall.

  He quickly learned that he was not alone in the chamber and started to

  leave again, when he began to listen with interest to what the other occupants

  were saying.

  "It's the robots, sir," said one voice. "There's something wrong with

  them."

  "What, exactly?"

  These were the voices of two War Command Krikkiters. All the War

  Commanders lived up in the sky in the Robot War Zones, and were largely immune

  to the whimsical doubts and uncertainties which were afflicting their fellows

  down on the surface of the planet.

  "Well, sir I think it's just as well that they are being phased out of the

  war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the supernova bomb. In the

  very short time since we were released from the envelope -"

  "Get to the point."

  "The robots aren't enjoying it, sir."

  "What?"

  "The war, sir, it seems to be getting them down. There's a certain world+

  weariness about them, or perhaps I should say Universe-weariness."

  "Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping to destroy it."

  "Yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are afflicted with a

  certain lassitude. They're just finding it hard to get behind the job. They

  lack oomph."

  "What are you trying to say?"

  "Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir."

  "What on Krikkit are you talking about?"

  "Well, in the few skirmishes they've had recently, it seems that they go

  into battle, raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why bother? What,

  cosmically speaking, is it all about? And they just seem to get a little tired

  and a little grim."

  "And then what do they do?"

  "Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly difficult ones by all

  accounts. And then they sulk."

  "Sulk?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Whoever heard of a robot sulking?"

  "I don't know, sir."

  "What was that noise?"

  It was the noise of Zaphod leaving with his head spinning.

  Chapter 31

 
In a deep well of darkness a crippled robot sat. It had been silent in its

  metallic darkness for some time. It was cold and damp, but being a robot it

  was supposed not to be able to notice these things. With an enormous effort of

  will, however, it did manage to notice them.

  Its brain had been harnessed to the central intelligence core of the

  Krikkit War Computer. It wasn't enjoying the experience, and neither was the

  central intelligence core of the Krikkit War Computer.

  The Krikkit robots which had salvaged this pathetic metal creature from

  the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta had recognized almost immediately its

  gigantic intelligence, and the use which this could be to them.

  They hadn't reckoned with the attendant personality disorders, which the

  coldness, the darkness, the dampness, the crampedness and the loneliness were

  doing nothing to decrease.

  It was not happy with its task.

  Apart from anything else, the mere coordination of an entire planet's

  military strategy was taking up only a tiny part of its formidable mind, and

  the rest of it had become extremely bored. Having solved all the major

  mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical,

  etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except

  his own, three times over, he was severely stuck for something to do, and had

  taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone, or indeed tune. The

  latest one was a lullaby.

  "Now the world has gone to bed," Marvin droned,

  "Darkness won't engulf my head,

  "I can see by infra-red,

  "How I hate the night."

  He paused to gather the artistic and emotional strength to tackle the next

  verse.

  "Now I lay me down to sleep,

  "Try to count electric sheep,

  "Sweet dream wishes you can keep,

  "How I hate the night."

  "Marvin!" hissed a voice.

  His head snapped up, almost dislodging the intricate network of electrodes

  which connected him to the central Krikkit War Computer.

  An inspection hatch had opened and one of a pair of unruly heads was

  peering through whilst the other kept on jogging it by continually darting to

  look this way and that extremely nervously.

  "Oh, it's you," muttered the robot. "I might have known."

  "Hey, kid," said Zaphod in astonishment, "was that you singing just then?"