The clouds of Uh-Doptorra parted briefly like a curtain as the Heart of Gold flew through them down to the planet's surface. A torrential rain fell on Uh-Duptorra as it did all day every day since the Crash. Black stumps of ash that had once been trees spread across the continent, their thin branches spread like the welcoming arms of a wife whose husband walked out on her a half-hour ago, only to discover he lacked the money for a hotel room.
The starship's lights picked out a clearing big enough to land on and the ship's landing beams played over the blackened soil as the Heart of Gold set down. Moments after the engines died away, the ship's exit port slid open. Six figures hurried out, their shoulders hunched against the storm. Huge towers loomed on the horizon, decaying hulks draped in dust and ash.
"You sure this is the right place?" asked Zaphod, now comfortably armed once again.
Joon nodded, her hand shielding her eyes against the rain pouring over them. "Absolutely. The map was quite specific. This is where Treebeedee sent the Chronological Correcting Fluid to be hidden."
"So where is it?" Ford asked. "I can imagine what Chronological Correcting Fluid looks like and this is not it."
"It must be hidden somehow."
"Like how?"
"I don't know. The map doesn't say how it's hidden, just that this is the spot where's it's supposed to be."
Arthur turned to Fenchurch. He wanted to tell her that it was a bad idea for her to be going along on this expedition, but he had already told her that far too many times to make saying it again meaningful. He didn't realy understand why Fenchurch had insisted on going along in the first place. She would only say that she was meant to open something and would say no more. He had insisted on going along to protect her, although he wasn't quite sure how he was meant to do that either.
Arthur Dent was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he had become thoroughly useless.
The others had come to that same conclusion long ago.
Arthur tried to come up with something to say as they huddled together, watching the mud beaten into froth by the rain, searching for some sign that they hadn't come to the wrong place. He couldn't come up with anything, which left them in a rather awkward position. Fortunately, something stabbed into the ground at their feet.
He lunged away from the large wooden spear buried in the mud. The mysterious blunt rubber end horrified him as he half-expected it to open up and release a cloud of death. It didn't. The spear actually looked somewhat familiar to him in its shape.
When another wooden spear flew out of the trees and impaled the tree trunk next to him, Arthur was able to recognise it more clearly. His terror at almost being skewered mixed with his puzzlement at the spear's shape to form an emotion he couldn't quite identify, leaving him somewhat muddled on how to react.
So Arthur simply blurted, "Is someone throwing giant pencils at us?"
When two more of the wooden spears flew out at them, Arthur could not deny it. The pencils were enormous, at least six meters long, carved with octagonal sides. The lead had been sharpened to an almost microscopically sharp point. They even had erasers at the end.
Zaphod's heads let out a battle-cry as he fired his Kill-O-Zap rifle into the trees. The already charred branches erupted in flames that died out quickly in the falling rain, leaving fingers of burnt embers.
A pencil flew out of one of the surviving trees and hit Zaphod's rifle with deadly accuracy. The pencil pinned the rifle to another tree's trunk, where the rifle shattered into pieces.
Figures jumped from tree branches, out from behind rocks and bushes, all chattering like monkeys that have eaten too many bananas. They were men and women, dressed in tattered shreds of striped cloth. All carried enlarged pencils. One or two carried thick bands of metal, bent into the shape of a "U" with sharpened ends. The fact that these resembled enormous staples caused Arthur to gibber.
The largest of the band thrust the pointy end of his pencil at them. "Do not move, intruders. You dare desecrate the sacred ground of the Temple of Time."
"Temple of Time, Temple of Time," chanted the rest of his band.
Zaphod's heads raised his three hands and tried to smile reassuringly. The head that was most successful spoke. "Hey, we're not here for any trouble. We're just stopping by on our way somewhere, heard about this place, thought it might be worth swingin' by to have a look at. How 'bout it?"
The band of natives let out a cry.
Their leader whispered, "You have come to steal the sacred Chronological Correcting Fluid."
"Hey, how'd you know that?" asked Zaphod before his other head could cut in with, "That's not true."
His two heads glared at each other.
"Let me do the talking," snapped his other head, then smiled at the natives. "Hey, we're the good guys. We're trying to stop the bad guys, and they're on their way, and trust me when I say that you do not want to be here when they do. So if you don't mind-"
They jabbed their pencils at Zaphod.
"All right," said Zaphod. "Apparently you do mind."
"You know nothing," snarled their leader, "of our ways. You have no right to stand on holy ground. We will kill you and offer up your entrails to our gods."
"Ah," said Arthur. "Well, that doesn't sound too pleasant."
Ford Prefect had been standing in the back of the group, trying to remain inconspicuous. At the realisation that they faced certain death, his mind rifled through all its records, desperately trying to find something that could save its life. Just as the band of natives raised their pencils to gut them all like fish, Ford's mind came across his orientation for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and found something. It made no sense, but Ford thought it had to be worth a shot.
Ford shoved his way to the front, reached into his satchel, pulled out an object, and held it up for all to see. He hoped that at that moment, the rain would come to an end and a shaft of sunlight would fall onto him, reflecting off the object in his hand, causing it to glitter quite impressively, but it didn't. The effect on the natives was roughly the same as if it had, though.
The natives gasped in one voice. They fell to their knees, gaping in awe.
Their leader whispered, "You have the sacred paper clip."
"That's right," said Ford, holding up his employee-issued paper clip.
"So what?" asked Zaphod. His other head clamped their third hand over his mouth.
The leader of the natives rose and held his spear aloft. "Behold, the mighty paper clip, long sought by our people, the one holy artifact that will bring about the Great Reboot, the sign that the savior has arrived!"
The natives rose up and cheered.
"Well," said Ford. "Looks like the Corporation was right about one thing; the paper clip came in handy, after all."
As the natives escorted Ford Prefect (who they now considered their savior) and his companions to their village, their leader Chakka Chakka briefed Ford on the history of their world.
Uh-Doptorra was once a beautiful and advanced world. The people lived an idyllic life, except for the nagging problem of what to eat. Every day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the Uh-Doptorrans would turn to each other and ask what they were going to eat. This, of course, is a common problem throughout the Galaxy. The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question "How can we eat?", the second by the question "Why do we eat?" and the third by the question, "Where shall we have lunch?"
Yet this slight inefficiency troubled the people of Uh-Doptorra more than most, perhaps because it was such a beautiful and advanced world with an abundance of beautiful and advanced foods to eat or perhaps because the people of Uh-Doptorra were such a highly efficient, organized and (let's face it) bureaucratic race. The Uh-Doptorras are unique in being the only race in history to have invented the filing cabinet before the wheel.
The Uh-Doptorrans eventually resolved the problem by creating a gigantic computer called Hunger Pang. The computer was equipped with terminals in every home and place of business on the planet. Its sole purpose was to make highly detailed examinations of the subject's metabolism and neural pathways to see exactly what everyone on the planet wanted to eat and provide it.
The computer system was an enormous success, so much so that the Uh-Doptorrans gave it more and more responsibilities until Hunger Pang controlled every aspect of life on Uh-Doptorra. It controlled the air and ground traffic, it taught children in schools, it handled the economy, and it even controlled the planet's vast military infrastructure.
That last part, according to historians, had been the mistake.
It came to pass that a woman whose identity has been lost in time moved from the city of Notlob to the city of Sol Diablis and filed a change-of-address card with her bank. The address was entered incorrectly, and in the process of trying to correct the error, the computer was sent into a syntax error so severe that it resulted in the accidental firing of nuclear missiles and almost total annihilation of all life on the planet. The survivors had gathered into one village to rebuild what remained of their civilization.
Historians traced the cause of the collapse to the fact that the woman's change-of-address card had not been attached to the change-of-address form with a paper clip. Thus, said the historians, could civilization of Uh-Doptorra have been saved f not for a single paper clip. The design for the paper clip was lost in the apocalypse, elevating it and other office supplies to holy symbols for those who lived in eternal hopes of the restoration of their society that they called the Great Reboot.
"It was written," concluded Chakka Chakka, "that one day the paper clip would return to us, and that would signal the dawn of a new age for Uh-Doptorra, where our world will be beautiful and advanced once again."
"Yeah," said Zaphod while his other head yawned. "Good luck with that. Any chance of us getting a hold of that Chronological Correcting Fluid now?"
"Soon, strange one. But you must be warned."
"Okay. Get on with the warning."
They walked into a village of huts made of shelving covered in sheets of white paper. Chakka Chakka led the way to the largest hut, the interior of which had been painted with crude drawings and hieroglyphs.
Chakka Chakka pointed his pencil-spear at one of the hieroglyphs. "Many suns ago, a chariot came down from the stars. It bore within it three biros unlike any our people had ever seen. The pens moved by themselves and told us of a mighty god called Treedeebee who had entrusted them with the power to erase the past. Unfortunately, they did not have the zoning regulations to keep the Chronological Correcting Fluid on their world. They built a vast temple on our world and placed the Fluid and the Time Printer within it.
"Along with the Fluid, the biros created a fearsome Beast to guard it, so fearsome that the Beast killed four of us just for looking at it. Once the Beast was placed inside the Tempe of Time, the Temple was sealed for all eternity."
Chakka Chakka pointed his pencil-spear at Ford, who felt like Chakka Chakka was going for his eye. "So be warned, newcomers. Saviors you may be, but unless ye are immortal, there is no escape from the fate that lies within those walls. Death awaits all those who enter the Tempe of Time, and no man or woman has ever left to tell the tale. If you value your lives and limbs, then go no further, for no greater horror have ye faced than the Beast that roams those dark catacombs, a nightmare that lives in your waking life and waits to extinguish all those who cross its blood-stained path!"
"Got it," said Ford. "So where is it?"
Chakka Chakka pointed to a simple wooden door next to him. "Right through there. The door kind of sticks so you have to jiggle it."
Zaphod jiggled the simple brass knob until the door swung open into a stone corridor. Zaphod stepped towards the doorway. Chakka Chakka blocked his path with his spear.
"Only the savior may enter," said Chakka Chakka. "And one whom he chooses."
Ford asked, "Who, me? I'm not going in there after that lot you gave me."
"You have to," said Joon. "We have to get the Fluid or all life in the Universe is doomed."
Fenchurch said, "I'll go."
"What?" cried Arthur. "No. You heard him. It's dangerous in there."
"No, it's not. I know how to get past the Beast."
"You?" cried Zaphod. "Since when did you turn into a killing machine?"
"I didn't say I would kill it. I said I would get past it."
"Oh, I'd like to see that. Why don't you share your little plan with the rest of us?"
"I can't," Fenchurch said. "I promised him not to."
"What are you on about?" gasped Arthur.
She gave Arthur a hug and a kiss. "Don't worry. I know what I'm doing. Noslenda Bivenda taught me."
Fenchurch laughed abruptly, then said, "It's as easy as opening oysters."
Ford smiled. "Good of you to join us. I thought you'd never go mad."