WHEN A PLANET IS DESTROYED AT ALL POINTS ALONG ITS PROBABILITY AXIS, IT CEASES TO EXIST.
BUT IF AN ELEMENT OF IMPROBABILITY IS INTRODUCED, STRANGE THINGS CAN HAPPEN.
At the very moment that the planet Earth was destroyed along its entire probability axis, an element of improbability appeared at the center. Somewhere in a restaurant called Stavro Mueller's, the room flickered around Arthur and went dark.
"What's going on?" he asked with his typical genius for the obvious. Ford, across the room, opened his mouth to answer, and was suddenly inexplicably twisted away into the shape of a very disgruntled wombat.
"Ford, what are you doing?" demanded Arthur as he and Ford were illuminated with a particularly unpleasant glowing orange color, noticing that he himself was beginning to feel rather uncomfortably similar to a bowling ball.
"It's the Improbability Drive!" Ford yelled as best he could through a wombat's mouth. Arthur was beginning to feel an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu.
"Not again," he mumbled, suddenly feeling his first twinge of sympathy for Agrajag as his body was suddenly hurled by invisible hands toward a neat triangle of bowling pins. He shrieked as his ribs crashed into them and they became ten fierce lemmings on impact, gnawing viciously at Arthur, who had inconveniently ceased to be a bowling ball and was now in serious danger of having his purple shrimp-shaped fingers removed.
Trillian and Random were similarly encumbered, albeit by hedgehogs, as they followed Ford and Arthur in spinning through an infinite black void that was occasionally illuminated with glowing bits of purple and green paisely cloth fluttering about randomly.
Suddenly everything spun away into the void, ceasing to take Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and Random with it. Their eyes were temporarily blinded by a hideous white light, and as it dimmed, they looked around them, blinking in amazement, at a sight most of them knew well: the bridge of the Heart of Gold.
"Zaphod?" Ford asked, for once more confused than Arthur. "But the Golden Bail..."
"Yeah? It's powering this ship," said Zaphod cooly. "What of it?"
"But wasn't it destroyed," put in Arthur, "When the robots of Krikkit put it into the Wikkit keyhole?"
"Who ever said anything about it being destroyed?" demanded one of Zaphod's heads testily. The other was busy with a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
"I thought it melted," said Arthur lamely.
"No, little monkey," Zaphod informed him loftily, "it didn't melt, because I stole it."
"You stole it." Ford said flatly, looking at his cousin with an expression that somehow managed to exactly convey an extreme lack of surprise.
"What did you expect?" said Arthur. "He stole it once, why wouldn't he-"
"Oh, shut up, all of you!" yelled Random. She was already recovering from the incident at Stavro Mueller's, though she still trembled periodically. "Why are we here?"
"Because. I saved your bums, baby," said Zaphod, exploring the subtle nuances of his drink with his agonized taste buds. In fact they were about as subtle as a conversation punctuated by several vicious slams to the head with a sledgehammer, but this particular tongue of Zaphod's had already been through several such experiences and was now nearly as corroded as that particular throat.
Trillian, with as much dignity as possible, picked herself up from the floor and walked over to study the computer screen Zaphod's left head seemed intently interested in. She peered just as intently at the moving figures, realized Zaphod was just playing Pac-Man, and took a seat in the chair next to him.
"So how ya been, baby?" his right head asked nonchalantly, gazing somewhere off to her left as it began to feel the effects of the Gargle Blaster.
"Just great," she snarled. "In the past few months, I've missed an excellent job opportunity because I was missing my contacts, been kidnapped by insane aliens who dragged me off to a planet beyond Pluto, which was called Rupert, for no appartent reason except that they had no sense of personal purpose, and, let's see, what else? If I'm not mistaken, my home planet was just destroyed by Vogons. How's it hanging your way?"
"Not too bad. How are you, Ford?" Zaphod said calmly.
"All right, considering," Ford replied, looking distractedly about the bridge and noticing several new chandeliers and a neon green splatter pattern on the walls. "I like what you've done in here."
"Done? Oh, yes. That. Well," Zaphod said, "I didn't. The Heart of Gold did."
"Ah," said Ford.
"So where are we going?" said Arthur, beginning to have the distinct impression that it wasn't anyplace he'd like.
"I have no idea," Zaphod's left head said candidly, glancing up briefly from an intense round of Pac-Man. "We've just been wandering the universe for several years. Stopping and drinking here and there, picking up the occasional knick-knack. That down there," he gestured down a corridor, "is a nice little ship I stole. Runs smoother than-"
"We?" interjected Arthur.
"Yeah, we," said Zaphod. "Me, Eddie, and that cute little guy over there in the corner."
Arthur turned slowly, wondering exactly what he expected to see, and beheld a tiny, round, and obnoxiously cheerful robot.
"Oh,"said Ford, attatching more gravity to the word than it is normally given. "Colin," he added in the manner of a man who has just been slapped in the face continuously with a catfish for 36 hours and has just found out that it is going to happen again.
"And boy am I glad to see you!" Colin burbled, hovering closer to Ford's head, still annoyingly out of reach.
"That's interesting," Ford snapped, guiltily remembering how he'd abandoned the innocent robot to its fate. Ah, well, he reasoned, it wasn't as if anything had actually happened to him. He decided to question the little robot later and turned to arguing with Zaphod about where they were going. Zaphod opted for the nearest bar, but Ford was vitally interested in putting as much distance as possible between himself and whatever remained of the Guide's offices. Eventually Zaphod persuaded him that the disgruntled grey Vogons had no idea that he even existed and that they ought to go get a drink, which was secretly what Ford wanted in the first place.
Arthur lounged boredly across the room while all this was going on, attempting to create a meaningful relationship with Random. All previous attempts to do so had failed miserably, but the stubborn man had not yet given up hope. He slouched calmly in his tattered dressing gown, which he had unfortunately put on again before leaving Earth, picking at a loose thread on the armrest as he attempted to discuss the Golden Bail which powered the ship they were now riding in with her. Eventually he gave up, mostly because she stopped fiddling with his copy of the original Guide, slammed it onto the desk next to him, and stormed off in search of a bathroom.
"That went well," Arthur mumbled, picking up the Guide and searching with great curiosity for the entry on Earth. He was unsurprised and more than a little annoyed when an error message came up, informing him that this particular entry was being updated and would be visible in a few minutes. He instead turned indifferently to an article on an indiginous breed of Jartrignian earthworms.
Jartrignian earthworms (the Guide read) are one of the most disgusting creatures imaginable. As soon as the young are born, the mother eats over half-
Arthur snapped the cover shut in disgust and flung the electronic book across the room, where it made a satisfying crunch against the wall and dropped to the floor.
"Hey there, how's it going?" Colin asked, having finally abandoned his euphoric attempts at conversation with Ford Prefect, who had been discovering the nuances of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters for himself and was therefore quite laconic.
"What do you want?" Arthur snarled, digging his hand deeply into the pocket of his dressing gown. He sensed that something had been there not so long ago, but whatever it was had since fallen out through a little hole he had neglected to notice. All that was left now was a large piece of uninspiring grey lint and an object Arthur's aunt had given him years ago for his birthday. No matter how long Arthur pondered the object, he had never been able to divine exactly what it was.
He took it out and examined it now, attempting to ignore Colin's joyous advances. The object was about three inches in length, and of a uniform greyish-pink color all around. It was rather oddly shaped, but had no electronic components or anything else that could define itself as interesting, even in Arthur's dull mind. He tossed it up in the air a few times, as if testing the weight, then snatched it before Colin could say something cheerful about it and dropped it back into his pocket, where it lay in a manner remarkably similar to that of a dead mouse.
"I just want to be your friend, and make you happier and happier and-"
"Zark off," Arthur said. He remembered having heard the phrase from a disgruntled man who had recieved a Rory for the most gratuitous use of the word Belgium in a serious screenplay, and also remembered having heard it from Zaphod before that, and was now finding it quite useful.
"What's that?" Colin asked smugly.
"I SAID, ZARK OFF!" Arthur shouted, fervently wishing he had kept the Guide in his hand so he could now throw it at Colin instead.
"With pleasure!" Colin said unbearably and did the aerial equivalent of skipping off down the nearest hallway.
"Gets to you after a while, doesn't he, Arthur?" said Ford imperturbably.
"Just a little," Arthur grumbled, hunching down in his seat again.
"Let's go for a walk," said Ford.
"Why?" said Arthur.
"It's either that or sit around listening to me and Zaphod argue. And if we walk, it'll be harder for Colin to find us and be nice to us again."
"All very true," said Arthur, and followed him. When they were deep in the bowels of the Heart of Gold, Ford spoke.
"That's why I tried to kill him."
"What?" said Arthur predictably, blinking a great deal more than his friend.
"That," Ford said, with more patience than he was wont to use, "is why I tried to kill him."
"I think I'm missing something here," said Arthur slowly. Ford was getting the distinct impression that this had happened before when he had tried to explain things to Arthur.
"The fact that he is annoying...is...the reason...I tried to kill him. Actually I didn't physically do anything to him, Arthur," said Ford, ducking to avoid bashing his head on a particularly low ceiling support. "It was more of a command, really."
"Ah."
"But I did tell him he would probably die," Ford added quickly, before the man in the tattered bathrobe could come to any conclusions.
"Ah," said Arthur again, this time slightly more expressively.
"If you want to know, I sent him up a mail chute with the Hitchhiker's Guide Mark Two. You know, that hideously annoying, more than somewhat evil bird thing?"
"Oh, that," said Arthur, as if he had found the Guide Mark Two on the bottom of his shoe recently and been more than slightly offended by its smell.
"Yes. I told him he'd probably be incinerated," Ford confided, supressing a giggle rather badly, "or tortured or something. I'm extremely surprised that he survived, and rather devilishly curious as to why, though I suppose he was just nice to the Vogons. Nasty creatures, Vogons," he murmured, "couldn't imagine them putting up with robots being nice to them. They would probably have just tried to read him some of their poetry. Though you'd be able to tell if they had, you know. Not even a manic robot can put up with that drivel for very long." He and Arthur shuddered as they pondered seperate but very similarly horrifying memories of the last Vogon poetry reading they had mutually and involuntarily attended.
"So why does Zaphod have him?" Arthur asked after a while.
"That's what I've been trying to ask him," said Ford, "but every time I mention it he starts off on another argument about which bar we should go to, or tells me to go discuss it with my pet monkey-"
"Your pet monkey?" Arthur said indignantly. He was used to Zaphod being rude by now, but this was a new depth of Zaphod's lack of couth to which Arthur had not previously had the displeasure of being exposed. Ford shrugged.
"Shall we be heading back now?" he asked.
"You think I want to stay here with Zaphod and go to whatever bar suits his fancy, watch him steal whatever ship he currently covets at the time, wander the universe at random until I die, Ford? Haven't you ever thought there's more to life?" Arthur demanded, stopping in mid-stride and causing Ford to narrowly miss another ceiling support.
"Not particularly," Ford said infuriatingly, "although I wouldn't mind doing most of those things. Without Zaphod. In fact I think I'd enjoy it more that way." Arthur glared at him malevolantly, thinking of how fun it would be to stab him viciously with a sharpened butterknife and leave him to be read poetry at by Vogons.
"Ow! Fardwarks!" Ford added a minute later, upon bashing his head on a rafter. "Zarking short little Damograns, can't learn to build a ship properly..."
"Ford, what's the point?" Arthur asked. Ford did something he rarely did, which was to blink, and said "Of complaining about the Damograns? I don't know, it's nice to blame your pain on someone else, you know, and-"
"No, not that. I meant of life," Arthur said.
"By the way," said Ford, "What ever happened to Marvin?"
"That," said Arthur morosely, "is an extremely long story. I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to tell you all about it, but for now..." his voice trailed off into nothing, and Ford stared in amazement as he saw Arthur begin to do something he'd never seen him do before, which was to hunch over into a peculiar shape and cry. Ford was quite alarmed, as people from his planet only cried in times of extreme grief or emergency, or, in the case of the women, when they wanted something, which was far more often than the frequency with which the men cried. So. In short, Ford was more than somewhat startled.
"What's wrong?" he asked, with more concern in his voice than Arthur had ever heard.
"What do you mean, what's wrong, you blithering idiot?" snarled Arthur. "For so many years I have lost count, I have been wandering around with a bunch of insane aliens (here Ford stiffened somewhat) who have nothing better to do than zip off to the nearest bar until they get bored and go in search of the next one! I have also seen my planet destroyed more times than I care to recall-"
"Two," inserted Ford helpfully, and was silenced by a withering glare.
"SHUT UP!" Arthur said, looking, for the first time in his life, extremely dangerous. "I have attempted to assist a very strange old man with a very strange name in saving a universe in which I take absolutely no pleasure in living in...wait...is that how you'd say that?" Arthur became lost in his own grammatical intricacies and mumbled disconsolantly to himself as Ford laid an arm comfortingly around his shoulder, assisting him in ducking under the obnoxiously low white rafters.
Eventually Arthur's sobs slowed to an intermittent hiccup, and they found themselves near the galley, or kitchen, as Arthur would have it. Ford suggested that they drop in for a bit of tea, which sent Arthur into another diatribe, this one containing several unprintable facts Arthur wished to make clear upon the subject of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Ford managed to calm him down enough that he sat cross-armed in a high-backed wooden chair, bemoaning the general state of the universe as Ford searched the cupboards in vain for a teacup.
Part of the problem with these particular cupboards containing teacups (or, more concisely, not containing them) was that it was a fully automated galley. This could be quite pleasant for lazy bachelors like Zaphod, whose heads enjoyed eating far more than his three arms enjoyed doing dishes. In fact, Zaphod had never touched a bottle of dish soap, or any kind of soap for that matter, in his life. Zaphod's tendency to stock the ship with fairly useless, breathtakingly expenisve items also manifested itself to Ford and Arthur.
"Look at this," said Ford quietly, carrying a small black object over to Arthur's hopeless form.
"I don't want to see any more of Zaphod's useless Sirius Cybernetics-"
"This one might actually be helpful, Arthur," said Ford, fidlding with several of the buttons along the black thing's base. He found a large, red one which flipped it open, displaying a small screen.
"Is that another Hitchhiker's Guide? Because if it is-"
"No, no, Arthur!" Ford said excitedly, restraining Arthur's upraised fist with surprising difficulty. The long nights of rock-lifting on prehistoric Earth, and Arthur's far more recent escapades with Fenchurch had built an amazing amount of muscle. "Watch this!" He tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and on the small greyish pad in front of the screen appeared a small piece of chocolate.
"Can it do tea?" Arthur asked, suddenly immensely interested. Ford tapped a few keys, and a small brownish bag appeared.
"It's American tea," said Ford, tapping a few more keys. He got only another bag of the same material. "It'll have to do, though." He produced, in rapid succession, milk, sugar, and a little pink porcelain frog with a disturbing pour spout in the rear, out of which cream came when the frog was tipped.
"Ford..."
"No, I didn't ask for it to come out of a pink frog's bum, Arthur," Ford said disgustedly. "Don't be ridiculous."
"That is probably," said Arthur, as he sipped his tea with obvious relish, "Zaphod's fault."
"Most things are, actually, if you trace them back far enough," Ford said amiably as he set to work getting a very large mug of Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
"I don't think you need any more of those," said Arthur quietly, staring into the depths of his cup.
"Of course I do."
After a surprisingly long amount of time went by in this manner, when Ford had become satisfactorily intoxicated, Arthur announced that he was tired.
"It's that tea," Ford said, trying to wriggle his eyebrows superiorly at Arthur and missing him by about six feet. "Caffeine is nothing compared to this stuff." He waved a hand in the general direction of his Gargle Blaster and succeeded in knocking it off the table and into his lap. He shoved the mug off onto the floor and got shakily to his feet, swaying like an enraged bumblebee.
"Are you coming?" he demanded, lurching off down the corridor haphazardly. Arthur ran to catch him, saving him just in time from bashing his head on another of the Damogran ceiling supports.
"Thanks, Arthur," he said tipsily, swaying off in the general direction of his old bunk. Arthur followed him nervously, stopping him from hitting a wall here, a rafter there, and a door everywhere else. Eventually he managed to tuck Ford away into his bunk from the old days before the Earth had really been destroyed.
"'Night, Arthur," said Ford, as his old friend pulled the covers up to his chin. "Do you remember..."
Arthur patiently waited for Ford to finish his sentence, realized he was asleep, and collapsed onto his own bed to dream of days gone by.
BUT IF AN ELEMENT OF IMPROBABILITY IS INTRODUCED, STRANGE THINGS CAN HAPPEN.
At the very moment that the planet Earth was destroyed along its entire probability axis, an element of improbability appeared at the center. Somewhere in a restaurant called Stavro Mueller's, the room flickered around Arthur and went dark.
"What's going on?" he asked with his typical genius for the obvious. Ford, across the room, opened his mouth to answer, and was suddenly inexplicably twisted away into the shape of a very disgruntled wombat.
"Ford, what are you doing?" demanded Arthur as he and Ford were illuminated with a particularly unpleasant glowing orange color, noticing that he himself was beginning to feel rather uncomfortably similar to a bowling ball.
"It's the Improbability Drive!" Ford yelled as best he could through a wombat's mouth. Arthur was beginning to feel an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu.
"Not again," he mumbled, suddenly feeling his first twinge of sympathy for Agrajag as his body was suddenly hurled by invisible hands toward a neat triangle of bowling pins. He shrieked as his ribs crashed into them and they became ten fierce lemmings on impact, gnawing viciously at Arthur, who had inconveniently ceased to be a bowling ball and was now in serious danger of having his purple shrimp-shaped fingers removed.
Trillian and Random were similarly encumbered, albeit by hedgehogs, as they followed Ford and Arthur in spinning through an infinite black void that was occasionally illuminated with glowing bits of purple and green paisely cloth fluttering about randomly.
Suddenly everything spun away into the void, ceasing to take Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and Random with it. Their eyes were temporarily blinded by a hideous white light, and as it dimmed, they looked around them, blinking in amazement, at a sight most of them knew well: the bridge of the Heart of Gold.
"Zaphod?" Ford asked, for once more confused than Arthur. "But the Golden Bail..."
"Yeah? It's powering this ship," said Zaphod cooly. "What of it?"
"But wasn't it destroyed," put in Arthur, "When the robots of Krikkit put it into the Wikkit keyhole?"
"Who ever said anything about it being destroyed?" demanded one of Zaphod's heads testily. The other was busy with a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
"I thought it melted," said Arthur lamely.
"No, little monkey," Zaphod informed him loftily, "it didn't melt, because I stole it."
"You stole it." Ford said flatly, looking at his cousin with an expression that somehow managed to exactly convey an extreme lack of surprise.
"What did you expect?" said Arthur. "He stole it once, why wouldn't he-"
"Oh, shut up, all of you!" yelled Random. She was already recovering from the incident at Stavro Mueller's, though she still trembled periodically. "Why are we here?"
"Because. I saved your bums, baby," said Zaphod, exploring the subtle nuances of his drink with his agonized taste buds. In fact they were about as subtle as a conversation punctuated by several vicious slams to the head with a sledgehammer, but this particular tongue of Zaphod's had already been through several such experiences and was now nearly as corroded as that particular throat.
Trillian, with as much dignity as possible, picked herself up from the floor and walked over to study the computer screen Zaphod's left head seemed intently interested in. She peered just as intently at the moving figures, realized Zaphod was just playing Pac-Man, and took a seat in the chair next to him.
"So how ya been, baby?" his right head asked nonchalantly, gazing somewhere off to her left as it began to feel the effects of the Gargle Blaster.
"Just great," she snarled. "In the past few months, I've missed an excellent job opportunity because I was missing my contacts, been kidnapped by insane aliens who dragged me off to a planet beyond Pluto, which was called Rupert, for no appartent reason except that they had no sense of personal purpose, and, let's see, what else? If I'm not mistaken, my home planet was just destroyed by Vogons. How's it hanging your way?"
"Not too bad. How are you, Ford?" Zaphod said calmly.
"All right, considering," Ford replied, looking distractedly about the bridge and noticing several new chandeliers and a neon green splatter pattern on the walls. "I like what you've done in here."
"Done? Oh, yes. That. Well," Zaphod said, "I didn't. The Heart of Gold did."
"Ah," said Ford.
"So where are we going?" said Arthur, beginning to have the distinct impression that it wasn't anyplace he'd like.
"I have no idea," Zaphod's left head said candidly, glancing up briefly from an intense round of Pac-Man. "We've just been wandering the universe for several years. Stopping and drinking here and there, picking up the occasional knick-knack. That down there," he gestured down a corridor, "is a nice little ship I stole. Runs smoother than-"
"We?" interjected Arthur.
"Yeah, we," said Zaphod. "Me, Eddie, and that cute little guy over there in the corner."
Arthur turned slowly, wondering exactly what he expected to see, and beheld a tiny, round, and obnoxiously cheerful robot.
"Oh,"said Ford, attatching more gravity to the word than it is normally given. "Colin," he added in the manner of a man who has just been slapped in the face continuously with a catfish for 36 hours and has just found out that it is going to happen again.
"And boy am I glad to see you!" Colin burbled, hovering closer to Ford's head, still annoyingly out of reach.
"That's interesting," Ford snapped, guiltily remembering how he'd abandoned the innocent robot to its fate. Ah, well, he reasoned, it wasn't as if anything had actually happened to him. He decided to question the little robot later and turned to arguing with Zaphod about where they were going. Zaphod opted for the nearest bar, but Ford was vitally interested in putting as much distance as possible between himself and whatever remained of the Guide's offices. Eventually Zaphod persuaded him that the disgruntled grey Vogons had no idea that he even existed and that they ought to go get a drink, which was secretly what Ford wanted in the first place.
Arthur lounged boredly across the room while all this was going on, attempting to create a meaningful relationship with Random. All previous attempts to do so had failed miserably, but the stubborn man had not yet given up hope. He slouched calmly in his tattered dressing gown, which he had unfortunately put on again before leaving Earth, picking at a loose thread on the armrest as he attempted to discuss the Golden Bail which powered the ship they were now riding in with her. Eventually he gave up, mostly because she stopped fiddling with his copy of the original Guide, slammed it onto the desk next to him, and stormed off in search of a bathroom.
"That went well," Arthur mumbled, picking up the Guide and searching with great curiosity for the entry on Earth. He was unsurprised and more than a little annoyed when an error message came up, informing him that this particular entry was being updated and would be visible in a few minutes. He instead turned indifferently to an article on an indiginous breed of Jartrignian earthworms.
Jartrignian earthworms (the Guide read) are one of the most disgusting creatures imaginable. As soon as the young are born, the mother eats over half-
Arthur snapped the cover shut in disgust and flung the electronic book across the room, where it made a satisfying crunch against the wall and dropped to the floor.
"Hey there, how's it going?" Colin asked, having finally abandoned his euphoric attempts at conversation with Ford Prefect, who had been discovering the nuances of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters for himself and was therefore quite laconic.
"What do you want?" Arthur snarled, digging his hand deeply into the pocket of his dressing gown. He sensed that something had been there not so long ago, but whatever it was had since fallen out through a little hole he had neglected to notice. All that was left now was a large piece of uninspiring grey lint and an object Arthur's aunt had given him years ago for his birthday. No matter how long Arthur pondered the object, he had never been able to divine exactly what it was.
He took it out and examined it now, attempting to ignore Colin's joyous advances. The object was about three inches in length, and of a uniform greyish-pink color all around. It was rather oddly shaped, but had no electronic components or anything else that could define itself as interesting, even in Arthur's dull mind. He tossed it up in the air a few times, as if testing the weight, then snatched it before Colin could say something cheerful about it and dropped it back into his pocket, where it lay in a manner remarkably similar to that of a dead mouse.
"I just want to be your friend, and make you happier and happier and-"
"Zark off," Arthur said. He remembered having heard the phrase from a disgruntled man who had recieved a Rory for the most gratuitous use of the word Belgium in a serious screenplay, and also remembered having heard it from Zaphod before that, and was now finding it quite useful.
"What's that?" Colin asked smugly.
"I SAID, ZARK OFF!" Arthur shouted, fervently wishing he had kept the Guide in his hand so he could now throw it at Colin instead.
"With pleasure!" Colin said unbearably and did the aerial equivalent of skipping off down the nearest hallway.
"Gets to you after a while, doesn't he, Arthur?" said Ford imperturbably.
"Just a little," Arthur grumbled, hunching down in his seat again.
"Let's go for a walk," said Ford.
"Why?" said Arthur.
"It's either that or sit around listening to me and Zaphod argue. And if we walk, it'll be harder for Colin to find us and be nice to us again."
"All very true," said Arthur, and followed him. When they were deep in the bowels of the Heart of Gold, Ford spoke.
"That's why I tried to kill him."
"What?" said Arthur predictably, blinking a great deal more than his friend.
"That," Ford said, with more patience than he was wont to use, "is why I tried to kill him."
"I think I'm missing something here," said Arthur slowly. Ford was getting the distinct impression that this had happened before when he had tried to explain things to Arthur.
"The fact that he is annoying...is...the reason...I tried to kill him. Actually I didn't physically do anything to him, Arthur," said Ford, ducking to avoid bashing his head on a particularly low ceiling support. "It was more of a command, really."
"Ah."
"But I did tell him he would probably die," Ford added quickly, before the man in the tattered bathrobe could come to any conclusions.
"Ah," said Arthur again, this time slightly more expressively.
"If you want to know, I sent him up a mail chute with the Hitchhiker's Guide Mark Two. You know, that hideously annoying, more than somewhat evil bird thing?"
"Oh, that," said Arthur, as if he had found the Guide Mark Two on the bottom of his shoe recently and been more than slightly offended by its smell.
"Yes. I told him he'd probably be incinerated," Ford confided, supressing a giggle rather badly, "or tortured or something. I'm extremely surprised that he survived, and rather devilishly curious as to why, though I suppose he was just nice to the Vogons. Nasty creatures, Vogons," he murmured, "couldn't imagine them putting up with robots being nice to them. They would probably have just tried to read him some of their poetry. Though you'd be able to tell if they had, you know. Not even a manic robot can put up with that drivel for very long." He and Arthur shuddered as they pondered seperate but very similarly horrifying memories of the last Vogon poetry reading they had mutually and involuntarily attended.
"So why does Zaphod have him?" Arthur asked after a while.
"That's what I've been trying to ask him," said Ford, "but every time I mention it he starts off on another argument about which bar we should go to, or tells me to go discuss it with my pet monkey-"
"Your pet monkey?" Arthur said indignantly. He was used to Zaphod being rude by now, but this was a new depth of Zaphod's lack of couth to which Arthur had not previously had the displeasure of being exposed. Ford shrugged.
"Shall we be heading back now?" he asked.
"You think I want to stay here with Zaphod and go to whatever bar suits his fancy, watch him steal whatever ship he currently covets at the time, wander the universe at random until I die, Ford? Haven't you ever thought there's more to life?" Arthur demanded, stopping in mid-stride and causing Ford to narrowly miss another ceiling support.
"Not particularly," Ford said infuriatingly, "although I wouldn't mind doing most of those things. Without Zaphod. In fact I think I'd enjoy it more that way." Arthur glared at him malevolantly, thinking of how fun it would be to stab him viciously with a sharpened butterknife and leave him to be read poetry at by Vogons.
"Ow! Fardwarks!" Ford added a minute later, upon bashing his head on a rafter. "Zarking short little Damograns, can't learn to build a ship properly..."
"Ford, what's the point?" Arthur asked. Ford did something he rarely did, which was to blink, and said "Of complaining about the Damograns? I don't know, it's nice to blame your pain on someone else, you know, and-"
"No, not that. I meant of life," Arthur said.
"By the way," said Ford, "What ever happened to Marvin?"
"That," said Arthur morosely, "is an extremely long story. I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to tell you all about it, but for now..." his voice trailed off into nothing, and Ford stared in amazement as he saw Arthur begin to do something he'd never seen him do before, which was to hunch over into a peculiar shape and cry. Ford was quite alarmed, as people from his planet only cried in times of extreme grief or emergency, or, in the case of the women, when they wanted something, which was far more often than the frequency with which the men cried. So. In short, Ford was more than somewhat startled.
"What's wrong?" he asked, with more concern in his voice than Arthur had ever heard.
"What do you mean, what's wrong, you blithering idiot?" snarled Arthur. "For so many years I have lost count, I have been wandering around with a bunch of insane aliens (here Ford stiffened somewhat) who have nothing better to do than zip off to the nearest bar until they get bored and go in search of the next one! I have also seen my planet destroyed more times than I care to recall-"
"Two," inserted Ford helpfully, and was silenced by a withering glare.
"SHUT UP!" Arthur said, looking, for the first time in his life, extremely dangerous. "I have attempted to assist a very strange old man with a very strange name in saving a universe in which I take absolutely no pleasure in living in...wait...is that how you'd say that?" Arthur became lost in his own grammatical intricacies and mumbled disconsolantly to himself as Ford laid an arm comfortingly around his shoulder, assisting him in ducking under the obnoxiously low white rafters.
Eventually Arthur's sobs slowed to an intermittent hiccup, and they found themselves near the galley, or kitchen, as Arthur would have it. Ford suggested that they drop in for a bit of tea, which sent Arthur into another diatribe, this one containing several unprintable facts Arthur wished to make clear upon the subject of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Ford managed to calm him down enough that he sat cross-armed in a high-backed wooden chair, bemoaning the general state of the universe as Ford searched the cupboards in vain for a teacup.
Part of the problem with these particular cupboards containing teacups (or, more concisely, not containing them) was that it was a fully automated galley. This could be quite pleasant for lazy bachelors like Zaphod, whose heads enjoyed eating far more than his three arms enjoyed doing dishes. In fact, Zaphod had never touched a bottle of dish soap, or any kind of soap for that matter, in his life. Zaphod's tendency to stock the ship with fairly useless, breathtakingly expenisve items also manifested itself to Ford and Arthur.
"Look at this," said Ford quietly, carrying a small black object over to Arthur's hopeless form.
"I don't want to see any more of Zaphod's useless Sirius Cybernetics-"
"This one might actually be helpful, Arthur," said Ford, fidlding with several of the buttons along the black thing's base. He found a large, red one which flipped it open, displaying a small screen.
"Is that another Hitchhiker's Guide? Because if it is-"
"No, no, Arthur!" Ford said excitedly, restraining Arthur's upraised fist with surprising difficulty. The long nights of rock-lifting on prehistoric Earth, and Arthur's far more recent escapades with Fenchurch had built an amazing amount of muscle. "Watch this!" He tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and on the small greyish pad in front of the screen appeared a small piece of chocolate.
"Can it do tea?" Arthur asked, suddenly immensely interested. Ford tapped a few keys, and a small brownish bag appeared.
"It's American tea," said Ford, tapping a few more keys. He got only another bag of the same material. "It'll have to do, though." He produced, in rapid succession, milk, sugar, and a little pink porcelain frog with a disturbing pour spout in the rear, out of which cream came when the frog was tipped.
"Ford..."
"No, I didn't ask for it to come out of a pink frog's bum, Arthur," Ford said disgustedly. "Don't be ridiculous."
"That is probably," said Arthur, as he sipped his tea with obvious relish, "Zaphod's fault."
"Most things are, actually, if you trace them back far enough," Ford said amiably as he set to work getting a very large mug of Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
"I don't think you need any more of those," said Arthur quietly, staring into the depths of his cup.
"Of course I do."
After a surprisingly long amount of time went by in this manner, when Ford had become satisfactorily intoxicated, Arthur announced that he was tired.
"It's that tea," Ford said, trying to wriggle his eyebrows superiorly at Arthur and missing him by about six feet. "Caffeine is nothing compared to this stuff." He waved a hand in the general direction of his Gargle Blaster and succeeded in knocking it off the table and into his lap. He shoved the mug off onto the floor and got shakily to his feet, swaying like an enraged bumblebee.
"Are you coming?" he demanded, lurching off down the corridor haphazardly. Arthur ran to catch him, saving him just in time from bashing his head on another of the Damogran ceiling supports.
"Thanks, Arthur," he said tipsily, swaying off in the general direction of his old bunk. Arthur followed him nervously, stopping him from hitting a wall here, a rafter there, and a door everywhere else. Eventually he managed to tuck Ford away into his bunk from the old days before the Earth had really been destroyed.
"'Night, Arthur," said Ford, as his old friend pulled the covers up to his chin. "Do you remember..."
Arthur patiently waited for Ford to finish his sentence, realized he was asleep, and collapsed onto his own bed to dream of days gone by.