Fenchurch fell through a black vast void. She worried. She also spun a great deal.
Eventually she landed on something which surprised her by being soft and got to her feet. She loked around and found that she had landed in a huge pile of stuff that looked unnervingly like pink insulation or cotton candy. She stepped forward, found it quite springy, and bounced off toward the horizon.
Two hours later, she hadn't found anything worth mentioning, and sat down by the side of a stream, whose water, she found, left quite a bit to be desired. She was very aware of the fact that her tender and long-unused feet had been touching the ground ever since she had landed. She winced as she rubbed at a blister, decided to carry her shoes for a while, and stood up to continue walking.
After quite some time she found a small, eerie forest, hung with something a bit like Spanish moss and much more unnervingly like carnivorous vines. She examined the "teeth" of the plants, decided she didn't like the look of them, and continued on her way.
It had been approximately five hours since the SlumpJet had suddenly blurred away into oblivion and she had lost Arthur, and she wondered idly where he was and what was happening to him. She didn't know it, but he was at least as unhappy as she was. At that moment he was sitting in a miserable hotel room on a miserable planet called NowWhat, thinking miserable thoughts, most of them about her (or more concisely, the lack of her), and some small beasts that wanted to eat his leg. She sighed and began to search, futilely, for food.
Arthur sat, extremely bored, in the bridge of the Heart of Gold, scrolling through a list of figures related to the probability of NutriMatics actually producing tea. He sighed, for so far the figures were disenhearteningly low, and scuffed off in his slippers to find Ford (or possibly somone else more interesting, such as Trillian). Anything was better than staying here with Eddie.
Eddie had been experiencing personality problems as of late. For example, there was the day he decided he was a Hungarian Fruit Fly and attempted to flit about the cabin. This was quite impossible due to his size and weight and especially to the fact that he was bolted to the wall, but despite this and Zaphod's useless insistence that Eddie was in fact a computer, he insisted on continuing. These problems caused further problems, not the least of which was that Zaphod had drunk himself into a stupor and was now lying on the floor, staring cross-eyed at the ceiling and murmuring something about the fact that he had only two heads, while Eccentrica Gallumbits (the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6) had (what the narrator hopes is obviously) three breasts, and if you could follow that sentence, you're more deranged than I am.
Arthur (and most of the other passengers) did not view this as a problem (as such), because things were generally a whole lot saner without Zaphod. Eddie was, under normal circumstances, able to handle these things by putting the ship under auto pilot, but these were not normal circumstances, and by the point his Swedish Grandmother Who Has Just Snorted Several Pixy Stix stage rolled around, the ship was already (unbeknownst even to Eddie) hurtling at a dangerously fast speed toward a small, barren, and generally uninteresting planet known (for reasons known, important, and interesting only to its sole native) as Bert. This, typically, failed to worry Arthur, mainly because he didn't notice.
As the ship neared the small, boring planet of Bert, Arthur was far away from Zaphod and Eddy, scuffing down a dim, narrow passageway in search of the ship's more intelligent life. Trillian resolutely refused to appear in any of the places in which Arthur looked, and he eventually found himself back in the sleeping quarters he shared with Ford. They shared only the room - they had seperate hammocks. Get your minds out of the gutter.
Suddenly Ford looked up from the Hitchhiker's Guide, in which he was reading a very odd passage on the Quantabulan Ordinary Wambleplatchett, because Arthur Dent was standing in front of him. He wrestled with the idea of returning to the Wambleplatchett, because it was much more interesting, but Arthur's face looked so lonely he set the Guide down and decided another of Arthur's lame excuses for conversation would be tolerable enough to warrant it.
Meanwhile Zaphod's left head had found a dusty party horn under the desk. He examined it with as much interest as possible considering how many Gargle Blasters he'd just had and stuck it into his left mouth, from whence the paper portion of the horn shot out and slapped loudly into the right head's ear. "Hey," it protested drunkenly (the head, that is, not the party horn).
"What do YOU want?" asked the left head, loudly blowing the horn again in close proximity to the offended ear. "This is kinda fun," he added.
"Shu'p and leave me alone, I hav' a ter'ble headache."
"No, I like it!"
"I don't!"
"Nobody asked you," said the left head, again making the offending noise.
"I SAID SHU'P!"
"I SAID NO!"
"I BLEW IN IT!" yelled the right head in an obnoxious, self-satisfied manner, utterly failing to make one of Zaphod's arms tear the party horn away from his left mouth.
"So?" demanded Zaphod's left head, slapping the reaching hand.
"OW! STOP IT!"
"Hey, watch this!" announced the left head (these were often famous (or near-famous) last (or near-last) words (often the last word was along the lines of "AAAAAAUUUGGGH!" or "Don't put the fireworks in the coffee machine, Uncle Charlie!" (although strictly and literally speaking Zaphod had no Uncle Charlie)), and had been so for Zaphod the last three times he'd attempted to show off and ended up nearly dying), tearing the paper part off the horn. The preposterous head then proceeded to concentrate all the power of its lung (or lungs, the narrator refuses to speculate on this) into the horn. The horn made a sound remarkably similar to a dying Wambleplatchett, and the noisemaking element in the end buried itself deep in the right head's ear.
"LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE NOW, YOU STUPID-"
Suddenly Zaphod's right head's screams were broken off by Eddie, who said, on the speakers all over the ship, in a fake Scandinavian accent, six very alarming words.
It is a major problem in most of the universe that authors often keep their readers in suspense, causing a lot of further complications (not the least of which involve suicide, heart attacks, obstructed nasal passages, and sewing needles, but we'll get to that later). I would therefore like to tell you right up front that nothing especially dangerous is going to happen. I might kill off some minor character or other if I'm in the mood, but it will most likely not be anyone that is generally liked. Also, Bert's resident is not immediately damaged in any physical or metaphysical sense, because he's going to be busy fishing elsewhere on the planet.
The words Eddie said were these: "We're going to crash on Bert."
"Huh?" said Arthur.
"Oh st," said Ford, which was actually what Arthur would have said in about five more seconds.
"Who's Bert?" said Arthur.
"It's not a question of who," said Ford cryptically, "it's a question of when."
Arthur paused for several minutes, appearing to take all this in, nodding slowly as he did so.
"What?"
There was a terrible, ghastly noise.
There was a terrible, ghastly silence.
There was a terrible, ghastly noise.
Arthur began to feel intense deja vu.
"Ford?"
"MMMmmmmph."
"Ford, where are you? Are you all right?"
"Umph uff umph uff yumph farmphng foomph..."
"What?" Arthur shifted his weight to the other foot.
"Yeah, now that you got your farking foot off my face!"
"Sorry, Ford."
"I'm sure."
"Where are we?" Arthur asked brilliantly.
"BERT!" Ford stormed out, shoving his copy of the Guide deeply into his satchel as he went. Arthur wondered, as he had wondered many times when conversing with Ford, if it was something special he did, or if it was just that the Universe was toying with his mind and somewhere a man who lived with a cat and a pencil was arguing with himself about whether Arthur in fact existed. He remembered rather uneasily the maniacal laughter he had caused Prak and decided to stay true to his English heritage and try not to think about it.
"So I was like, OH! MY! GOSH! And did you, like, hear what he, like, SAID about going out with her? Like, OH, my GOSH!"
The squealing teenage voice filled the cabin of the Heart of Gold, reverberating off every available surface and coming down on Zaphod's heads like a ton of something with which it is very unpleasant to be beaned. Zaphod was uncomfortably reminded of his sister, Ytzpratel.
"Hey?" he said experimentally.
"Like, what?"
"Eddie! SHUT UP!" Zaphod smiled slightly at the silence, then asked, "Where are we?"
Eddie was silent.
"Where are we, Eddie?"
More silence.
"I still have that axe."
"Bert," Eddie said sullenly, all resemblance to Ytzpratel suddenly gone.
"And...that would be where?" Zaphod said, pretending to use the last ounce of his patience on Eddie. In reality, Zaphod never posessed any patience, but he enjoyed acting.
Eddie dutifully spewed out some coordinates, which meant little to Zaphod, whose heads were still reeling from the Gargle Blasters (though somewhere, they stirred a dark and uneasy memory within him).
"Plural J Epsilon," Zaphod repeated quietly. "Well. And how's it going with the ship?"
"It isn't," said Eddie.
"Come again?"
"The ship," said Eddie in a very Belgian manner, "has stopped."
"And...is it likely to start again anytime soon?"
"No, it's not working."
"Great. Just great. I'm stuck on a planet I've never heard of with a computer that thinks it's...whatever random ethnicity suits it at the time, my useless cousin, a hot chick I can't get and her daughter who hates me, and a primitive ape from a planet that should have taken him with it."
"But Random doesn't like anybody," Eddie pointed out helpfully.
"Shut up," Zaphod suggested.
Colin hovered, humming slightly, in a disused hallway of the Heart of Gold. He was fairly happy about the ship crashing; after all, he hadn't been expecting anything remotely interesting to happen that day. Maybe he could find a new friend on the planet, apparently called Bert (according to the announcement Eddie's Scandinavian accent had made several minutes before). He sighed with glee and flitted off down the corridor to find someone to annoy.
As Arthur stepped outside the ship beside his friend Ford, he shivered involuntarily. It wasn't that the planet was cold. It was an incredibly humid, opressive atmosphere, and it reminded Arthur of walking into a greenhouse. It wasn't that he was afraid. He'd been on enough journeys with Ford to know better. Ford seemed to be able to get out of anything, and usually managed to get Arthur out of it too (Arthur's fight with Thor being the main exception). No, that wasn't it either. The planet was a hideous, bold shade of green, with a purple-tinted sky and some of the most hideous trees (or maybe they were just rock formations, but Arthur preferred to think of them as trees, because he didn't want to think about it if they weren't, although they appeared to be blinking at him) Arthur had ever encountered. That wasn't it either.
There was a tall, thin man standing on the ugly sand before him. He had long, grey hair, which looked as if had been raked rather than combed back away from his face, and black, sunken, hopeless eyes. On the man's shoulder was a very large, very black bird with a curved beak that suggested (rather unpleasantly, to Arthur) a sudden carnivorous fury, though none was forthcoming. In fact the bird just sat blinking at Arthur hungrily.
That was it.
"Er," said Arthur expressively, as he was wont to do on such occasions. "Um," he added, by way of expanding his remarks.
Ford wisely decided to take over the talking. "Hi," he said. The man stared at him as if forbidding further speech. "I'm Ford," Ford added after a moment's silence.
"...", said the man with the bird on his shoulder.
"Our, um, our ship crashed," Arthur said, trying to sound friendly and failing miserably at it.
"I see that," said the man in a voice that made Ford want to hide under the nearest available object.
"Ford, get away from my shoes, you can't have them," said Arthur calmly. Ford slowly stood again.
"So," said Ford, in a voice that was intended to convey that he was a very confident person who had not just attempted to hide under his best friend's foot, "Do you have a house?"
"No," said the man slowly. "I have a cave."
Arthur finally felt some breed of cameraderie growing within him, and didn't know if he liked it.
"That's nice," said Ford. "Listen, could you, uh...for money, I mean...um, what I mean is, can you feed us?"
"What kind of money?" asked the man.
"Uh..."
"Ask Zaphod for some," said Arthur to Ford. The man stood up as if electrified. "Did he just say Zaphod?" he demanded of Ford.
"Yeah."
"As in, Zaphod Beeblebrox?"
"Well, yeah..." Ford said slowly, beginning to wonder if this was a good thing.
"WHERE IS HE???" the old man roared, his previously dead eyes seeming to glow with rage. He leapt forward, the bird flying off his shoulder toward the ship. Ford grabbed the shoulder of Arthur's gown (which tore apart) and shoved him over backward into the ship. He rolled in over the sill himself and quickly shut and sealed the door.
"Ouch! You bruised my back! What was that all about, anyways?" Arthur complained, standing up and dusting off what little remained of his torn dressing gown.
"I didn't push you that hard. I don't know what's going on," said Ford, his face white as a Robot of Krikkit, "but I wasn't sticking around to find out. Let's get out of here." He stomped off down the hall toward the cabin to yell at Zaphod.
"Hi!" said Colin, bouncing up and down outside Random's door.
"Go away," Random mumbled, intent on something that was apparently happening on her wrist.
"Are you sure?" said Colin. "I could keep you company! Or we could watch something!" he gestured toward a tall cabinet full of Damogran movies, which did Random absolutely no good since they were in Damogran and had, at best, subtitles in Danqueddian, in which Random was unfortunately not fluent.
"Those movies suck. I hate movies, anyway. I hate everything...Hey! Didn't I tell you to go away?"
"Yeah," said Colin, shuffling nervously and oozing euphoria at her. "I'm bored, which is a wonderful way to feel, and-"
"Go be bored somewhere else."
"But-"
"ZARK OFF!" A well-aimed shoe sailed toward Colin. PING! A small door opened on his side. As the shoe completed its flight and began to react to the extreme gravity of Bert, something incredibly improbable happened. The shoelace wrapped partway around a small bit of metal - a wire, in fact - and pulled it loose.
"You make me angry," said Colin unexpectedly, and left.
"WHY CAN'T WE LEAVE?" Ford was screaming at approximately the same time.
"The ship isn't working," said Eddie calmly in a high-pitched wail.
"I don't want to hear this kind of thing. This," said Zaphod, "is precisely the kind of thing that I don't want to hear. What's the matter with the ship?" he demanded, ducking Ford's hand, which was attempting to choke one of his heads.
"Something has ruptured," said Eddie uselessly.
"Any particular something?" demanded Ford.
"Something," said Eddie, "in the engine room."
"Wow. That's useful," Zaphod muttered, leaning back away from Ford, who was still trying to do something unpleasant involving his neck.
"Listen," said Ford, finally getting ahold of Zaphod's collar and twisting it, "you don't happen to know a tall, thin man who looks like Death's little brother and goes around with a vicious-looking carnivorous bird on his shoulder, do you, Zaph?"
Zaphod's faces turned several interesting colors.
"Ah, not exactly, not know as such, no..." he looked down nervously at Ford's other arm, which was trying to find something in his pocket. This was soon clarified as Ford removed a small bag of very stale Lazputian Prangs (the very disgusting dried fruit of the Prangoid tree of Lazputia, which no one in their right mind would eat or even carry, because they give off a horrible smell. However, it was a well-known fact, especially to Zaphod, that Ford wasn't in his right mind and never had been). Ford began to eat the Prangs, pretending to enjoy them immensely, though in fact they tasted (if Ford had known it) remarkably like a skunk.
"Hungry?" said Ford.
"Not now," said Zaphod.
"Zarquon," murmured Ford, "I was hoping to use that as leverage. So anyways, this creepy, tall guy."
"What creepy tall guy?"
"The one," said Ford patiently, "who is inhabiting this planet, apparently alone."
"Oh bloody hell," someone said. Ford looked at Zaphod in surprise, for it wasn't the kind of thing he expected Zaphod to say. He turned and saw Arthur standing in the doorway.
"Bloody hell what?" said Ford impatiently, still gripping Zaphod's shirt collar firmly.
"Look," said Arthur. Ford followed his gaze to the corner, where Colin sat, sobbing disconsolately. Ford did something very rare, which was to blink.
"Why don't you go talk to him, Arthur?" he suggested. "I'm busy here."
"Fine."
"How do you know him?" Ford demanded, waving the bag of Prangs closer to Zaphod's face.
"Okay, fine. He was an old business partner."
"And?" Ford said.
"We, uh, had a disagreement."
"I see. Did it by any chance involve leaving him alone on a planet called Bert?"
"No, actually," said Zaphod, "that was the mercenaries' idea."
"The mercenaries, Zaphod?"
"Yeah."
Ford couldn't get any more out of him. Eventually he let him go, kicking at his leg in exasperation and hitting the chair instead, which only served to anger him more because he ended up stubbing his toe.
"I'm going down to the engine room to see what's wrong," he called to Arthur, who was busy being very puzzled by Colin.
Outside the ship, a very angry, tall, and disconcerting man was attempting to pry the door of the Heart of Gold open with a long bar made of a metal somewhat like iron. He wasn't making much progress.
Eventually he became more frustrated than usual and strolled off up the nearest mountain, intending to shove a rock down its slope and use Bert's extreme gravity to pop the door open (or create a new door in the ship, depending upon his aim). He never got there.
Eventually she landed on something which surprised her by being soft and got to her feet. She loked around and found that she had landed in a huge pile of stuff that looked unnervingly like pink insulation or cotton candy. She stepped forward, found it quite springy, and bounced off toward the horizon.
Two hours later, she hadn't found anything worth mentioning, and sat down by the side of a stream, whose water, she found, left quite a bit to be desired. She was very aware of the fact that her tender and long-unused feet had been touching the ground ever since she had landed. She winced as she rubbed at a blister, decided to carry her shoes for a while, and stood up to continue walking.
After quite some time she found a small, eerie forest, hung with something a bit like Spanish moss and much more unnervingly like carnivorous vines. She examined the "teeth" of the plants, decided she didn't like the look of them, and continued on her way.
It had been approximately five hours since the SlumpJet had suddenly blurred away into oblivion and she had lost Arthur, and she wondered idly where he was and what was happening to him. She didn't know it, but he was at least as unhappy as she was. At that moment he was sitting in a miserable hotel room on a miserable planet called NowWhat, thinking miserable thoughts, most of them about her (or more concisely, the lack of her), and some small beasts that wanted to eat his leg. She sighed and began to search, futilely, for food.
Arthur sat, extremely bored, in the bridge of the Heart of Gold, scrolling through a list of figures related to the probability of NutriMatics actually producing tea. He sighed, for so far the figures were disenhearteningly low, and scuffed off in his slippers to find Ford (or possibly somone else more interesting, such as Trillian). Anything was better than staying here with Eddie.
Eddie had been experiencing personality problems as of late. For example, there was the day he decided he was a Hungarian Fruit Fly and attempted to flit about the cabin. This was quite impossible due to his size and weight and especially to the fact that he was bolted to the wall, but despite this and Zaphod's useless insistence that Eddie was in fact a computer, he insisted on continuing. These problems caused further problems, not the least of which was that Zaphod had drunk himself into a stupor and was now lying on the floor, staring cross-eyed at the ceiling and murmuring something about the fact that he had only two heads, while Eccentrica Gallumbits (the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6) had (what the narrator hopes is obviously) three breasts, and if you could follow that sentence, you're more deranged than I am.
Arthur (and most of the other passengers) did not view this as a problem (as such), because things were generally a whole lot saner without Zaphod. Eddie was, under normal circumstances, able to handle these things by putting the ship under auto pilot, but these were not normal circumstances, and by the point his Swedish Grandmother Who Has Just Snorted Several Pixy Stix stage rolled around, the ship was already (unbeknownst even to Eddie) hurtling at a dangerously fast speed toward a small, barren, and generally uninteresting planet known (for reasons known, important, and interesting only to its sole native) as Bert. This, typically, failed to worry Arthur, mainly because he didn't notice.
As the ship neared the small, boring planet of Bert, Arthur was far away from Zaphod and Eddy, scuffing down a dim, narrow passageway in search of the ship's more intelligent life. Trillian resolutely refused to appear in any of the places in which Arthur looked, and he eventually found himself back in the sleeping quarters he shared with Ford. They shared only the room - they had seperate hammocks. Get your minds out of the gutter.
Suddenly Ford looked up from the Hitchhiker's Guide, in which he was reading a very odd passage on the Quantabulan Ordinary Wambleplatchett, because Arthur Dent was standing in front of him. He wrestled with the idea of returning to the Wambleplatchett, because it was much more interesting, but Arthur's face looked so lonely he set the Guide down and decided another of Arthur's lame excuses for conversation would be tolerable enough to warrant it.
Meanwhile Zaphod's left head had found a dusty party horn under the desk. He examined it with as much interest as possible considering how many Gargle Blasters he'd just had and stuck it into his left mouth, from whence the paper portion of the horn shot out and slapped loudly into the right head's ear. "Hey," it protested drunkenly (the head, that is, not the party horn).
"What do YOU want?" asked the left head, loudly blowing the horn again in close proximity to the offended ear. "This is kinda fun," he added.
"Shu'p and leave me alone, I hav' a ter'ble headache."
"No, I like it!"
"I don't!"
"Nobody asked you," said the left head, again making the offending noise.
"I SAID SHU'P!"
"I SAID NO!"
"I BLEW IN IT!" yelled the right head in an obnoxious, self-satisfied manner, utterly failing to make one of Zaphod's arms tear the party horn away from his left mouth.
"So?" demanded Zaphod's left head, slapping the reaching hand.
"OW! STOP IT!"
"Hey, watch this!" announced the left head (these were often famous (or near-famous) last (or near-last) words (often the last word was along the lines of "AAAAAAUUUGGGH!" or "Don't put the fireworks in the coffee machine, Uncle Charlie!" (although strictly and literally speaking Zaphod had no Uncle Charlie)), and had been so for Zaphod the last three times he'd attempted to show off and ended up nearly dying), tearing the paper part off the horn. The preposterous head then proceeded to concentrate all the power of its lung (or lungs, the narrator refuses to speculate on this) into the horn. The horn made a sound remarkably similar to a dying Wambleplatchett, and the noisemaking element in the end buried itself deep in the right head's ear.
"LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE NOW, YOU STUPID-"
Suddenly Zaphod's right head's screams were broken off by Eddie, who said, on the speakers all over the ship, in a fake Scandinavian accent, six very alarming words.
It is a major problem in most of the universe that authors often keep their readers in suspense, causing a lot of further complications (not the least of which involve suicide, heart attacks, obstructed nasal passages, and sewing needles, but we'll get to that later). I would therefore like to tell you right up front that nothing especially dangerous is going to happen. I might kill off some minor character or other if I'm in the mood, but it will most likely not be anyone that is generally liked. Also, Bert's resident is not immediately damaged in any physical or metaphysical sense, because he's going to be busy fishing elsewhere on the planet.
The words Eddie said were these: "We're going to crash on Bert."
"Huh?" said Arthur.
"Oh st," said Ford, which was actually what Arthur would have said in about five more seconds.
"Who's Bert?" said Arthur.
"It's not a question of who," said Ford cryptically, "it's a question of when."
Arthur paused for several minutes, appearing to take all this in, nodding slowly as he did so.
"What?"
There was a terrible, ghastly noise.
There was a terrible, ghastly silence.
There was a terrible, ghastly noise.
Arthur began to feel intense deja vu.
"Ford?"
"MMMmmmmph."
"Ford, where are you? Are you all right?"
"Umph uff umph uff yumph farmphng foomph..."
"What?" Arthur shifted his weight to the other foot.
"Yeah, now that you got your farking foot off my face!"
"Sorry, Ford."
"I'm sure."
"Where are we?" Arthur asked brilliantly.
"BERT!" Ford stormed out, shoving his copy of the Guide deeply into his satchel as he went. Arthur wondered, as he had wondered many times when conversing with Ford, if it was something special he did, or if it was just that the Universe was toying with his mind and somewhere a man who lived with a cat and a pencil was arguing with himself about whether Arthur in fact existed. He remembered rather uneasily the maniacal laughter he had caused Prak and decided to stay true to his English heritage and try not to think about it.
"So I was like, OH! MY! GOSH! And did you, like, hear what he, like, SAID about going out with her? Like, OH, my GOSH!"
The squealing teenage voice filled the cabin of the Heart of Gold, reverberating off every available surface and coming down on Zaphod's heads like a ton of something with which it is very unpleasant to be beaned. Zaphod was uncomfortably reminded of his sister, Ytzpratel.
"Hey?" he said experimentally.
"Like, what?"
"Eddie! SHUT UP!" Zaphod smiled slightly at the silence, then asked, "Where are we?"
Eddie was silent.
"Where are we, Eddie?"
More silence.
"I still have that axe."
"Bert," Eddie said sullenly, all resemblance to Ytzpratel suddenly gone.
"And...that would be where?" Zaphod said, pretending to use the last ounce of his patience on Eddie. In reality, Zaphod never posessed any patience, but he enjoyed acting.
Eddie dutifully spewed out some coordinates, which meant little to Zaphod, whose heads were still reeling from the Gargle Blasters (though somewhere, they stirred a dark and uneasy memory within him).
"Plural J Epsilon," Zaphod repeated quietly. "Well. And how's it going with the ship?"
"It isn't," said Eddie.
"Come again?"
"The ship," said Eddie in a very Belgian manner, "has stopped."
"And...is it likely to start again anytime soon?"
"No, it's not working."
"Great. Just great. I'm stuck on a planet I've never heard of with a computer that thinks it's...whatever random ethnicity suits it at the time, my useless cousin, a hot chick I can't get and her daughter who hates me, and a primitive ape from a planet that should have taken him with it."
"But Random doesn't like anybody," Eddie pointed out helpfully.
"Shut up," Zaphod suggested.
Colin hovered, humming slightly, in a disused hallway of the Heart of Gold. He was fairly happy about the ship crashing; after all, he hadn't been expecting anything remotely interesting to happen that day. Maybe he could find a new friend on the planet, apparently called Bert (according to the announcement Eddie's Scandinavian accent had made several minutes before). He sighed with glee and flitted off down the corridor to find someone to annoy.
As Arthur stepped outside the ship beside his friend Ford, he shivered involuntarily. It wasn't that the planet was cold. It was an incredibly humid, opressive atmosphere, and it reminded Arthur of walking into a greenhouse. It wasn't that he was afraid. He'd been on enough journeys with Ford to know better. Ford seemed to be able to get out of anything, and usually managed to get Arthur out of it too (Arthur's fight with Thor being the main exception). No, that wasn't it either. The planet was a hideous, bold shade of green, with a purple-tinted sky and some of the most hideous trees (or maybe they were just rock formations, but Arthur preferred to think of them as trees, because he didn't want to think about it if they weren't, although they appeared to be blinking at him) Arthur had ever encountered. That wasn't it either.
There was a tall, thin man standing on the ugly sand before him. He had long, grey hair, which looked as if had been raked rather than combed back away from his face, and black, sunken, hopeless eyes. On the man's shoulder was a very large, very black bird with a curved beak that suggested (rather unpleasantly, to Arthur) a sudden carnivorous fury, though none was forthcoming. In fact the bird just sat blinking at Arthur hungrily.
That was it.
"Er," said Arthur expressively, as he was wont to do on such occasions. "Um," he added, by way of expanding his remarks.
Ford wisely decided to take over the talking. "Hi," he said. The man stared at him as if forbidding further speech. "I'm Ford," Ford added after a moment's silence.
"...", said the man with the bird on his shoulder.
"Our, um, our ship crashed," Arthur said, trying to sound friendly and failing miserably at it.
"I see that," said the man in a voice that made Ford want to hide under the nearest available object.
"Ford, get away from my shoes, you can't have them," said Arthur calmly. Ford slowly stood again.
"So," said Ford, in a voice that was intended to convey that he was a very confident person who had not just attempted to hide under his best friend's foot, "Do you have a house?"
"No," said the man slowly. "I have a cave."
Arthur finally felt some breed of cameraderie growing within him, and didn't know if he liked it.
"That's nice," said Ford. "Listen, could you, uh...for money, I mean...um, what I mean is, can you feed us?"
"What kind of money?" asked the man.
"Uh..."
"Ask Zaphod for some," said Arthur to Ford. The man stood up as if electrified. "Did he just say Zaphod?" he demanded of Ford.
"Yeah."
"As in, Zaphod Beeblebrox?"
"Well, yeah..." Ford said slowly, beginning to wonder if this was a good thing.
"WHERE IS HE???" the old man roared, his previously dead eyes seeming to glow with rage. He leapt forward, the bird flying off his shoulder toward the ship. Ford grabbed the shoulder of Arthur's gown (which tore apart) and shoved him over backward into the ship. He rolled in over the sill himself and quickly shut and sealed the door.
"Ouch! You bruised my back! What was that all about, anyways?" Arthur complained, standing up and dusting off what little remained of his torn dressing gown.
"I didn't push you that hard. I don't know what's going on," said Ford, his face white as a Robot of Krikkit, "but I wasn't sticking around to find out. Let's get out of here." He stomped off down the hall toward the cabin to yell at Zaphod.
"Hi!" said Colin, bouncing up and down outside Random's door.
"Go away," Random mumbled, intent on something that was apparently happening on her wrist.
"Are you sure?" said Colin. "I could keep you company! Or we could watch something!" he gestured toward a tall cabinet full of Damogran movies, which did Random absolutely no good since they were in Damogran and had, at best, subtitles in Danqueddian, in which Random was unfortunately not fluent.
"Those movies suck. I hate movies, anyway. I hate everything...Hey! Didn't I tell you to go away?"
"Yeah," said Colin, shuffling nervously and oozing euphoria at her. "I'm bored, which is a wonderful way to feel, and-"
"Go be bored somewhere else."
"But-"
"ZARK OFF!" A well-aimed shoe sailed toward Colin. PING! A small door opened on his side. As the shoe completed its flight and began to react to the extreme gravity of Bert, something incredibly improbable happened. The shoelace wrapped partway around a small bit of metal - a wire, in fact - and pulled it loose.
"You make me angry," said Colin unexpectedly, and left.
"WHY CAN'T WE LEAVE?" Ford was screaming at approximately the same time.
"The ship isn't working," said Eddie calmly in a high-pitched wail.
"I don't want to hear this kind of thing. This," said Zaphod, "is precisely the kind of thing that I don't want to hear. What's the matter with the ship?" he demanded, ducking Ford's hand, which was attempting to choke one of his heads.
"Something has ruptured," said Eddie uselessly.
"Any particular something?" demanded Ford.
"Something," said Eddie, "in the engine room."
"Wow. That's useful," Zaphod muttered, leaning back away from Ford, who was still trying to do something unpleasant involving his neck.
"Listen," said Ford, finally getting ahold of Zaphod's collar and twisting it, "you don't happen to know a tall, thin man who looks like Death's little brother and goes around with a vicious-looking carnivorous bird on his shoulder, do you, Zaph?"
Zaphod's faces turned several interesting colors.
"Ah, not exactly, not know as such, no..." he looked down nervously at Ford's other arm, which was trying to find something in his pocket. This was soon clarified as Ford removed a small bag of very stale Lazputian Prangs (the very disgusting dried fruit of the Prangoid tree of Lazputia, which no one in their right mind would eat or even carry, because they give off a horrible smell. However, it was a well-known fact, especially to Zaphod, that Ford wasn't in his right mind and never had been). Ford began to eat the Prangs, pretending to enjoy them immensely, though in fact they tasted (if Ford had known it) remarkably like a skunk.
"Hungry?" said Ford.
"Not now," said Zaphod.
"Zarquon," murmured Ford, "I was hoping to use that as leverage. So anyways, this creepy, tall guy."
"What creepy tall guy?"
"The one," said Ford patiently, "who is inhabiting this planet, apparently alone."
"Oh bloody hell," someone said. Ford looked at Zaphod in surprise, for it wasn't the kind of thing he expected Zaphod to say. He turned and saw Arthur standing in the doorway.
"Bloody hell what?" said Ford impatiently, still gripping Zaphod's shirt collar firmly.
"Look," said Arthur. Ford followed his gaze to the corner, where Colin sat, sobbing disconsolately. Ford did something very rare, which was to blink.
"Why don't you go talk to him, Arthur?" he suggested. "I'm busy here."
"Fine."
"How do you know him?" Ford demanded, waving the bag of Prangs closer to Zaphod's face.
"Okay, fine. He was an old business partner."
"And?" Ford said.
"We, uh, had a disagreement."
"I see. Did it by any chance involve leaving him alone on a planet called Bert?"
"No, actually," said Zaphod, "that was the mercenaries' idea."
"The mercenaries, Zaphod?"
"Yeah."
Ford couldn't get any more out of him. Eventually he let him go, kicking at his leg in exasperation and hitting the chair instead, which only served to anger him more because he ended up stubbing his toe.
"I'm going down to the engine room to see what's wrong," he called to Arthur, who was busy being very puzzled by Colin.
Outside the ship, a very angry, tall, and disconcerting man was attempting to pry the door of the Heart of Gold open with a long bar made of a metal somewhat like iron. He wasn't making much progress.
Eventually he became more frustrated than usual and strolled off up the nearest mountain, intending to shove a rock down its slope and use Bert's extreme gravity to pop the door open (or create a new door in the ship, depending upon his aim). He never got there.