Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [57]
And soon they were engulfed in a thin and dancing obscurity. They passed on through it, on and on, dimly aware of vague shapes and whorls indistinguishable in the darkness except in the corner of the eye.
The dust dimmed the shafts of brilliant light. The shafts of brilliant light twinkled on the myriad specks of dust.
Trillian, again, regarded the passage from within her own frowning thoughts.
And they were through it. Whether it had taken a minute or half an hour they weren’t sure, but they were through it and confronted with a fresh blankness, as if space were pinched out of existence in front of them.
And now things moved quickly.
A blinding shaft of light seemed almost to explode from out of the block that had risen three feet out of the ground, and out of that rose a smaller plastic block, dazzling with interior dancing colors.
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
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