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, 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 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.