Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [61]
“We …” he said, “we have to be alone … I think.” He screwed up his face and then dropped his head forward, shaking it like someone trying to shake a coin out of a money box. He looked up again. “We have this bomb now, you see,” he said, “it’s just a little one.”
“I know,” she said.
He goggled at her as if she’d said something very strange about beetroots.
“Honestly,” he said, “it’s very, very little.”
“I know,” she said again.
“But they say,” his voice trailed on, “they say it can destroy everything that exists. And we have to do that, you see, I think. Will that make us alone? I don’t know. It seems to be our function, though,” he said, and dropped his head again.
“Whatever that means,” said a hollow voice from the crowd.
Trillian slowly put her arms around the poor bewildered young Krikkiter and patted his trembling head on her shoulder.
“It’s all right,” she said quietly, but clearly enough for all the shadowy crowd to hear, “you don’t have to do it.”
She rocked him.
“You don’t have to do it,” she said again.
She let him go and stood back.
“I want you to do something for me,” she said, and unexpectedly laughed.
“I want,” she said, and laughed again. She put her hand over her mouth and then said, with a straight face, “I want you to take me to your leader,” and she pointed into the War Zones in the sky. She seemed somehow to know that their leader would be there.
Her laughter seemed to discharge something in the atmosphere. From somewhere at the back of the crowd a single voice started to sing a tune that would have enabled Paul McCartney, had he written it, to buy the world.
Chapter 30
aphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like the hell of a guy he was. He was very confused, but continued crawling doggedly anyway because he was that brave.
He was confused by something he had just seen, but not half as confused as he was going to be by something he was about to hear, so it would be best, at this point, to explain exactly where he was.
He was in the Robot War Zones many miles above the surface of the planet Krikkit.
The atmosphere was thin here, and relatively unprotected from any rays or anything that space might care to hurl in this direction.
He had parked the starship Heart of Gold among the huge jostling dim hulks that crowded the sky here above Krikkit, and had entered what appeared to be the biggest and most important of the sky buildings, armed with nothing but a Zap gun and something for his headaches.
He had found himself in a long, wide and badly lit corridor in which he was able to hide until he worked out what he was going to do next. He hid because every now and then one of the Krikkit robots would walk along it, and although he had so far led some kind of charmed life at their hands, it had nevertheless been an extremely painful one, and he had no desire to stretch what he was only half inclined to call his good fortune.
He had ducked, at one point, into a room leading off the corridor, and had discovered it to be a huge and, again, dimly lit chamber.
In fact, it was a museum with just one exhibit—the wreckage of a spacecraft. It was terribly burnt and mangled, and now that he had caught up with some of the Galactic history he had missed through his failed attempts to have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him at school, he was able to put in an intelligent guess that this was the wrecked spaceship that had drifted through the Dust Cloud all those billions of years ago and started this whole business off.
But, and this is where he had become confused, there was something not at all right about it.
It was genuinely wrecked. It was genuinely burnt, but a fairly brief inspection by an experienced eye revealed that it was not a genuine spacecraft. It was as if it were a full-scale model of one—a solid blueprint In other words it was a very useful thing to have around if you suddenly decided to build a spaceship yourself and didn’t know how to do it. It was not, however, anything that would ever fly anywhere itself.
He was still puzzling over this—in fact