“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.

“Raaaaaarrrchchchchch!” 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.”

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.