Chapter Ten
Back on the bridge of the Heart of Gold, the members of the raiding party collapsed into chairs. Dustbots scampered around the floor sucking up every particle of grime that had the temerity to detach from their clothes and boots.
Marvin, who was not in the least bit tired, except possibly of life in general, and specifically with the examples before him, went and stood in a corner and switched himself off. He'd had quite enough for one day.
Zaphod was momentarily fazed by what he took to be Arthur's unaccustomed familiarity, and all round, hoopy froodiness. And then he remembered - he was having a conversation with an alien that acted like him, and spoke like him, because, in essence, it was him. It was all too weird.
Still, it was great to have someone really cool to speak to again.
"Hey Man, you should have seen me," boasted Zaphod.
"Yeah, great, but I played my part as well, you know," Zaphod retorted.
"Sure, but it got pretty wild out there, I can tell you, Guy," Zaphod contended.
"It's not just about leg-work, Dude. Someone has to be the brains of the outfit," Zaphod argued.
"True. But it was me putting my butt on the line, Man," Zaphod disputed.
"Actually, I think you'll find it was the Arthur's butt," said Zaphod with contempt.
What did he ever see in him?
Mooncalf was all wide-eyed wonderment, as he staggered about the bridge grinning inanely. He marvelled at the clean lines, the gleaming surfaces - the invisible cabling. The Heart of Gold was everything the Knapsacker was not. He'd never seen a ship like it. Ford had to raise his voice more than once to stop Mooncalf touching the various instrument panels arranged along the walls. He didn't want any more surprises today, and Mooncalf had even less idea of the consoles' functions than the regular crew members, and the regular crew members had absolutely no idea at all. When they wanted something to happen, they asked Eddie, and crossed their fingers.
Zaphod instructed Eddie not to accept any communication from Marsha's ship. They still had to get off the planet, and he didn't want to be the only person around if she came on line. If the next phase should go belly up, he could do with sharing some of the responsibility. In fact, the next phase had yet to be determined, but Zaphod was hopeful that a suitable plan would emerge. After all, events had started to swing their way, and Mooncalf's 'abduction' couldn't do any harm.
Zaphod reigned Mooncalf in just as he was about to hit a particularly interesting-looking button which in relatively happier times had once caught the attention of Arthur.
He had questions that needed answers, and there was no time like the present. It would be as well to get as much information from Mooncalf as he could, before speaking to Marsha. Forearmed is forewarned, he reasoned.
Wearily, Ford, Zaphod and Trillian joined Zaphod and Mooncalf, around the central console.
Mooncalf began by saying that he wasn't sure of the precise details, especially given Marsha's tendency to make things up as she went along. He'd never been particularly interested in his sister's hobby. However, in recent weeks her life had been impinging on his own more than he'd cared for. He'd felt compelled to pay attention. She'd given him plenty of time to mull over the scraps of information which had come his way. He'd also developed a knack for eavesdropping, and for putting two twos together, and more or less making four. He told Zaphod that he was reasonably sure that the broad sweep of events, as he understood them, were at least there or thereabouts.
At the convention on his home planet of Pillox II, which Mooncalf had also attended at his mother's insistence, and his sister's considerable annoyance, Marsha had wormed her way into the confidence of an invited guest, who claimed to be a bounty-hunter by the name of Jack Knife. She'd been all over him like a rash the moment she'd set eyes on him. Naked sexuality, and several large Arcturian mega-gins had encouraged Jack to reveal an idea he'd had. To whit, how he might use a new illegal technology, which could be used to doctor a distress beacon so that it would target a particular type of ship. He'd gone on to say that he'd managed to secure a device that would do just that. In itself, a potentially useful piece of equipment, but only if you knew the type of ship the felon was aboard, and then only if the automatic response unit hadn't been switched off, and then only if you could get close enough, and then only if it was the only ship of its class, in that sector of space. So maybe, it wasn't so very useful. However, the Herbert, unlike his colleagues, had realised the potential of the device with regards to the ex-President of the Imperial Galactic Government.
Jack, like everybody else in the galaxy, had been following the story of the Starship Heart of Gold. The Infinite Improbability Drive made the ship unique. The one-off nature of the propulsion system could, potentially, make it the most expensive sitting duck in the whole sorry history of aquatic wildfowl that didn't know when to shift their collective arse. It would be like phoning for a takeaway pizza.
The Drive would have to operating, of course, so that the Heart of Gold would be passing through every point in the universe simultaneously. That way it couldn't fail to receive the signal. The beauty of the plan was that it wouldn't matter where the signal was sent from. The Heart of Gold would simply materialize in orbit around the correct planet.
The plan, in part, relied on Zaphod Beeblebrox, or anybody else for that matter, not having the good sense to instruct the computer to override the automatic response unit. It also relied on the stupidity of the onboard computer. This was one of the plan's strong points.
In this respect, Jack Knife was undoubtedly correct. The Heart of Gold may be the most technologically advanced ship the galaxy has ever seen, but the contract to fit it out had been won by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, whose computers, with their Genuine People Personalities, tended to be even more witless than the personalities, of the genuine people, they were supposed to serve. One of the most serious flaws being an utterly ludicrous, but seemingly inbuilt, reluctance to give the most mind-numbingly obvious hints in the most calamitous of circumstances.
Should a zillion Arcturian dollars worth of next generation starship, be screaming to atom-splitting annihilation, on the rocky world beneath it, the shipboard computer would unerringly fail to inform its shipmates that hitting the big yellow button may just save them, and their exorbitantly expensive ship.
"Computer!" screamed Zaphod.
"Hi there. Say, why not just call me Eddie? Just two little syllables."
"Shut the fuck up", barked Zaphod.
Trillian stepped a little closer to Zaphod, and put a calming hand on his shoulder. "Computer, is there such a thing as an automatic response unit on this ship?" she queried. "A device which can be deactivated, so that the ship will not respond to distress calls?"
"Sure. Why do you ask?"
"We'd-like-it-switched-off," said Zaphod through gritted teeth.
"Okay. Say, why don't I do that for you right now?" said Eddie.
"Turn the fucking thing off!"
A nearby console radiated activity. Eddie said nothing. Instead, he sulked in a way that only a disembodied Genuine People Personality could.
Jack Knife, Mooncalf continued, had then introduced Marsha to the berserker, Dritsek. He'd been running a stall selling the traditional, tribal objet d'art of his home-world – by and large, a variety of beautifully-carved, mastodon ivory grips attached to alarmingly-sharp, pointy bits.
The Knapsacker was his ship, and in it, he and the bounty-hunter had travelled to the convention. Mooncalf subsequently discovered from one of the dombots, that Jack and Dritsek had been travelling together for some time, planet hopping, as part of the media circus that is the counterfeit universe of bountycons. The specially invited guests, at the event in question, and others like it, were no more bounty-hunters, than Mooncalf was a lion tamer. The convention had seemed to him to have been little more than a marketing opportunity for the publishers of bountyfic, and not a prospect, as the attendees supposed, to meet genuine bounty-hunters. Mooncalf hadn't been taken in.
However, in the interests of balance, it should be recognised that his opinion of the event only differed because his metaphorical anorak was of a different cut to that of his sister, who had worn hers to the con with extra-large blinkers sown into the hood. Mooncalf had his own blind spots, and incredibly, had not previously believed a word of the match-fixing scandal, that had rocked the sporting community several seasons ago. This despite the sort of overwhelmingly, damning evidence that would have made an Old Bailey defence lawyer snort with derision, the moment his client entered a plea of not guilty.
"So what happened to Lover Boy?" asked Trillian.
"He was arrested after one of the staged fights," Mooncalf explained. "I'd seen it coming a mile off - the fight not the arrest. Talk about obvious. Bounty-hunters are supposed to have lots of enemies, you see, even amongst themselves. It would be unrealistic to expect any con to go off without incident. It's part of the attraction for the nerds that go to these things," said Mooncalf, with the superior air of one, for whom such an appellation was unthinkable.
"So why arrest him?"
"He'd stabbed someone with a real knife. Maybe he had a genuine grievance against his victim, but it's just possible Marsha may have switched the fake one to get him out of the way. He'd already told her he couldn't take her with him on the mission. Promised he'd come back for her, but not even Marsha's that stupid. Once he was out of the way, she'd started coming on like she was the real thing. She was already wearing the gear, but that's par for the course at bountycons,' said Mooncalf with contempt.
"She wasn't exactly lying to Dritsek when she told him that the so-called bounty-hunter had taken her into his confidence. What she didn't say was that his shipmate was legless when he'd opened up to her. Then she went into overdrive and claimed they were engaged, and she'd agreed, reluctantly, to continue with the mission so that she could raise funds to get him off the rap."
By this time a crowd had gathered, friends of Jack mostly. This was Marsha's cue to turn on the waterworks. She loved her intended, she had said, and would go through hell and high water, to be with him. Dritsek, in Mooncalf's estimation, had behaved in a way typical of an actor, typecast by too many years playing the same role. He was more concerned with his public image than the reality of his life, because of which he wasn't too quick on the uptake. It hadn't occurred to him, at the time, to ask Marsha how she had got past the Vogons, who had provided the security for the bountycon, to see Jack.
By the time he'd realised his mistake it was too late, and he was on his way to Murkuria, with Marsha and Mooncalf in tow. She couldn't have left her brother behind for fear of what he might have said to their mother. This was her chance for a bit of adventure, just so long as their Mum didn't find out.
The Knapsacker had put down at what looked to be a promising spot. Three of the ship's six legs had suffered damage from boulders scattered around the landing site, but buried beneath the soil. Whilst this would not impair its ability to take off again, it would make landing back on Pillox II, illegal if not impossible. Bountycons depend, for reasons of commerce, on the more heavily populated planets, and dodgy spaceships are, not surprisingly, discouraged where their ability to land is liable to cause damage to the local infrastructure and lifeforms – in that order.
The area where the Knapsacker had put down had been chosen for its difficult terrain, and dearth of cabbages, and was hence relatively free of metaslugs. To stay their curiosity still further, Marsha allowed one of their number on the ship as an observer. A small price to pay, she'd felt, for a slime-free environment around the ship.
All systems on the Knapsacker had been shut down so that the ship could not be located. The distress beacon had been strapped to a hoverbot, which had formed part of the ambush team. This, it was hoped, would lure the crew of the Heart of Gold into the open.
"And that's where the berserker came in?" Zaphod interrupted.
"That's where Dritsek nearly bodged the whole operation," Mooncalf replied.
Mooncalf had heard Marsha and Dritsek arguing about tactics before they'd set off. She had wanted to just wade in, all guns blazing, and haul Zaphod's carcass back to the Knapsacker, dead or alive - it made no difference to her, or the reward money. Dritsek was a traditionalist though, and had no truck with modern technology, which partly explained the state of his ship.
"Great Zarquon!" spat Zaphod. There was a price on his heads, and it didn't matter if they were attached to his body. The Imperial Galactic Government was turning nasty.
Ironically, it was Zaphod deploying the Portable Weapons Inhibitor Field, which had given Dritsek the opportunity to use the schloop. Marsha had been impatient to get it over and done with. She'd reluctantly let him chance his arm. He'd missed though, just as she'd feared he would; not by much, but enough for the whole operation to go belly up. The schloop had subtly readjusted its trajectory at the last moment, when it realised that it was going to miss the intended target, and they'd ended up with the booby prize.
"So why not just take off anyway?" asked Ford.
"Well, Dritsek, for all his gruff manner, is loyal to Jack. They're friends, and they've been together a long time. I managed to pick that up from the arguments he had with Sis. He only agreed to go along with her because he thought that's what Jack wanted. If he could have spoken to him it might have been different, but as I said before, the Vogons provided the con-security, and a prisoner's right to visitors isn't high on their list of priorities. He thought the reward money would help get Jack off, if only by bribing the guards, but we'd never be allowed to land back on Pillox II, with his ship in its present condition."
"So that's it then. I take it we're to get you safely back home, as our part of the agreement?" said Ford taking in Mooncalf and Zaphod. "We wouldn't want you missing the start of the new season."
"Well, there's a bit more to it than that. I'm going to have to trust you from now on, but we did agree," he said, turning to Zaphod with a hopeful look. "You see, I really shouldn't leave Sis behind. We're supposed to stay together - Mum said. I know she did a terrible thing, but she's not all bad, not really. She'd just got caught up with events. We can leave Dritsek behind. The Knapsacker will be fixed soon, I reckon, and he'll be able to leave under his own steam. That just leaves Jack Knife, or whatever he's really called, in the lurch, but I don't suppose you're too worried about that. I know I'm not. Anyhow he may have known what he was doing, for all I know."
Ford took a moment. Mooncalf seemed genuine enough. He was in his own way quite intelligent, and despite his not getting on with his sister, she was still his sister, and he was looking out for her. It was doubtful the rescue attempt would have gone as well as it did without his help. Perhaps it wouldn't have succeeded at all. The passengers - they were hardly a crew - of the Heart of Gold should have taken a bit more interest in the workings of the ship, and must accept their share of the responsibility for what had happened. In a way, they were lucky that Jack Knife's scheme had not suggested itself to the real bounty-hunters. If those psychopaths had thought of it first, who knows how things might have turned out? They owed Mooncalf, and the main danger was over now. Ford came around to a more magnanimous viewpoint. He would send Marvin to collect Marsha.