Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [28]
“No, you won’t.”
“We will,” stated the robot simply.
“No, you won’t. It makes my ship work.”
“In a moment,” repeated the robot patiently, “we will have the Golden 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 10
hhh,“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 toward the town.
They walked quite near the watchers beneath the tree, swinging lanterns that 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 one 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 seemed remarkably pleasant, a little whimsical perhaps; one wouldn’t necessarily want to spend a long bus 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 chain-saw 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