– Yeah, - he said in a kind of relieved sneer, which is quite tricky, - well, I wouldn’t want to overtax your imagination, robot. - For a while nobody said anything, and Zaphod realized that the robots were obviously not here to make conversation, and that it was up to him.
– I can’t help noticing that you have parked your ship, - he said with a nod of one of his heads in the appropriate direction, - through mine.
There was no denying this. Without regard for any kind of proper dimensional behaviour they had simply materialized their ship precisely where they wanted it to be, which meant that it was simply locked through the
Again, they made no response to this, and Zaphod wondered if the conversation would gather any momentum if he phrased his part of it in the form of questions.
– …haven’t you? - he added.
– Yes, - replied the robot.
– Er, OK, - said Zaphod. - So what are you cats doing here?
Silence.
– Robots, - said Zaphod, - what are you robots doing here?
– We have come, - rasped the robot, - for the Gold of the Bail.
Zaphod nodded. He waggled his gun to invite further elaboration. The robot seemed to understand this.
– The Gold Bail is part of the Key we seek, - continued the robot, - to release our Masters from Krikkit.
Zaphod nodded again. He waggled his gun again.
– The Key, - continued the robot simply, - was disintegrated in time and space. The Golden Bail is embedded in the device which drives your ship. It will be reconstituted in the Key. Our Masters shall be released. The Universal Readjustment will continue.
Zaphod nodded again.
– What are you talking about? - he said.
A slightly pained expression seemed to cross the robot’s totally expressionless face. He seemed to be finding the conversation depressing.
– Obliteration, - it said. - We seek the Key, - it repeated, - we already have the Wooden Pillar, the Steel Pillar and the Perspex Pillar. In a moment we will have the Gold Bail…
– No you won’t.
– We will, - stated the robot.
– No you won’t. It makes my ship work.
– In a moment, - repeated the robot patiently, - we will have the Gold 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 12
– Shhh, - 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 towards the town.
They walked quite near the watchers beneath the tree, swinging lanterns which 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 on 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 they appeared remarkably pleasant; a little whimsical perhaps, one wouldn’t necessarily want to spend a long coach 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 chainsaw 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 game you know as cricket, - he said, and his voice still seemed to be wandering lost in subterranean passages, - is just one of those curious freaks of racial memory which can keep images alive in the mind aeons after their true significance has been lost in the mists of time. Of all the races on the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I’m afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.
– Rather fond of it myself, - he added, - but in most people’s eyes you have been inadvertently guilty of the most grotesque bad taste. Particularly the bit about the little red ball hitting the wicket, that’s very nasty.
– Um, - said Arthur with a reflective frown to indicate that his cognitive synapses were coping with this as best as they could, - um.
– And these, - said Slartibartfast, slipping back into crypt guttural and indicating the group of Krikkit men who had now walked past them, - are the ones who started it all, and it will start tonight. Come, we will follow, and see why.
They slipped out from underneath the tree, and followed the cheery party along the dark hill path. Their natural instinct was to tread quietly and stealthily in pursuit of their quarry, though, as they were simply walking through a recorded Informational Illusion, they could as easily have been wearing euphoniums and woad for all the
