Life, the Universe, and Everything [34]
A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.
"I hope it isn't good news," muttered Zipo Bibrok 5 / 108, "'cos I don't think I could bear it."
"Your Krikkit judgment was carried out today," said the girl sumptuously. There was no need to say such a straightforward thing sumptuously, but she went ahead and did it anyway because it was that sort of day. "I heard it on the radio," she said, "when I went back to the ship for the oil."
"Uhuh," muttered Zipo and rested his head back on the jewelled sand.
"Something happened," she said.
"Mmmm?"
"Just after the Slo-Time envelope was locked," she said, and paused a moment from rubbing in the Essence of Qualactin, "a Krikkit warship which had been missing presumed destroyed turned out to be just missing after all. It appeared and tried to seize the Key."
Zipo sat up sharply.
"Hey, what?" he said.
"it's all right," she said in a voice which would have calmed the Big Bang down. "Apparently there was a short battle. The Key and the warship were disintegrated and blasted into the space-time continuum. Apparently they are lost for ever."
She smiled, and ran a little more Essence of Qualactin on to her fingertips. He relaxed and lay back down.
"Do what you did a moment or two ago," he murmured.
"That?" she said.
"No, no," he said, "that."
She tried again.
"That?" she asked.
"Weeeeelaaaaah!"
Again, you had to be there.
The fragrant breeze drifted up from the sea again.
A magician wandered along the beach, but no one needed him.
Chapter 16
"Nothing is lost for ever," said Slartibartfast, his face flickering redly in the light of the candle which the robot waiter was trying to take away, "except for the Cathedral of Chalesm."
"The what?" said Arthur with a start.
"The Cathedral of Chalesm," repeated Slartibartfast. "It was during the course of my researches at the Campaign for Real Time that I ..."
"The what?" said Arthur again.
The old man paused and gathered his thoughts, for what he hoped would be one last onslaught on his story. The robot waiter moved through the space-time matrices in a way which spectacularly combined the surly with the obsequious, made a snatch for the candle and got it. They had had the bill, had argued convincingly about who had had the cannelloni and how many bottles of wine they had had, and, as Arthur had been dimly aware, had thereby successfully manoeuvred the ship out of subjective space and into a parking orbit round a strange planet. The waiter was now anxious to complete his part of the charade and clear the bistro.
"All will become clear," said Slartibartfast.
"When?"
"In a minute. Listen. The time streams are now very polluted. There's a lot of muck floating about in them, flotsam and jetsam, and more and more of it is now being regurgitated into the physical world. Eddies in the space-time continuum, you see."
"So I hear," said Arthur.
"Look, where are we going?" said Ford, pushing his chair back from the table with impatience. "Because I'm eager to get there."
"We are going," said Slartibartfast in a slow, measured voice, "to try to prevent the war robots of Krikkit from regaining the whole of the Key they need to unlock the planet of Krikkit from the Slo-Time envelope and release the rest of their army and their mad Masters."
"It's just," said Ford, "that you mentioned a party."
"I did," said Slartibartfast, and hung his head.
He realized that it had been a mistake, because the idea seemed to exercise a strange and unhealthy fascination on the mind of Ford Prefect. The more that Slartibartfast unravelled the dark and tragic story of Krikkit and its