“Hey, er, did I hear you say your name just now?” he said.
This was one of the many things that Arthur had told the enthusiastic little man.
“Yes, it's Arthur Dent.”
The man seemed to be dancing slightly to some rhythm other than any of the several that the band were grimly pushing out.
“Yeah,” he said, “only there was a man in a mountain wanted to see you.”
“I met him.”
“Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know.”
“Yes, I met him.”
“Yeah, well I think you should know that.”
“I do. I met him.”
The man paused to chew a little gum. Then he clapped Arthur on the back.
“OK,” he said, “all right. I'm just telling you, right? Good night, good luck, win awards.”
“What?” said Arthur, who was beginning to flounder seriously at this point.
“Whatever. Do what you do. Do it well.” He made a sort of clucking noise with whatever he was chewing and then some vaguely dynamic gesture.
“Why?” said Arthur.
“Do it badly,” said the man, “who cares? Who gives a shit?” The blood suddenly seemed to pump angrily into the man's face and he started to shout.
“Why not go mad?” he said. “Go away, get off my back will you, guy. Just zark off!!!”
“OK, I'm going,” said Arthur hurriedly.
“It's been real.” The man gave a sharp wave and disappeared off into the throng.
“What was that about?” said Arthur to a girl he found standing beside him. “Why did he tell me to win awards?”
“Just showbiz talk,” shrugged the girl. “He's just won an award at the Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards Ceremony, and was hoping to be able to pass it off lightly, only you didn't mention it, so he couldn't.”
“Oh,” said Arthur, “oh, well I'm sorry I didn't. What was it for?”
“The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word 'Fuck' In A Serious Screenplay. It's very prestigious.”
“I see,” said Arthur, “yes, and what do you get for that?”
“A Rory. It's just a small silver thing set on a large black base. What did you say?”
“I didn't say anything. I was just about to ask what the silver…”
“Oh, I thought you said 'wop'.”
“Said what?”
“Wop.”
People had been dropping in on the party now for some years, fashionable gatecrashers from other worlds, and for some time it had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked out at their own world beneath them, with its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards, its vast tracts of new desert, its seas full of biscuit crumbs and worse, that their world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they could manage to stay sober for long enough to make the entire party spaceworthy and maybe take it off to some other people's worlds where the air might be fresher and give them fewer headaches.
The few undernourished farmers who still managed to scratch out a feeble existence on the half-dead ground of the planet's surface would have been extremely pleased to hear this, but that day, as the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked up in haggard fear of yet another cheese-and-wine raid, it became clear that the party was not going to be going anywhere else for a while, that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be time to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was, what time of year it was, and whether in any of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi going anywhere.
The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a strange white spaceship which seemed to be half sticking through it. Together they were lurching, heaving and spinning their way round the sky in grotesque disregard of their own weight.
The clouds parted. The air roared and leapt out of their way.
The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, whilst the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.
The sky sang and screamed with the rage of it all and buffeted the ground with shock waves.
And suddenly, with a foop, the Krikkit ship was gone.
The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man leaning against an unexpectedly open door. It span and wobbled on its hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead. It staggered back across the sky again.
For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly they could not continue for long. The party was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional broken-backed pirouette could not disguise.
The longer, at this point, that it avoided the ground, the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.
Inside, things were not going well either. They were going monstrously badly, in fact, and people were hating it and saying so loudly. The Krikkit robots had been.
They had removed the Award for The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word 'Fuck' In A Serious Screenplay, and in its place had left a scene of devastation that left Arthur feeling almost as sick as a runner-up for a Rory.
“We would love to stay and help,” shouted Ford, picking his way over the mangled debris, “only we're not going to.”
The party lurched again, provoking feverish cries and groans from amongst the smoking wreckage.
“We have to go and save the Universe, you see,” said Ford. “And if that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right. Either way, we're off.”
He suddenly came across an unopened bottle lying, miraculously unbroken, on the ground.
“Do you mind if we take this?” he said. “You won't be needing it.”
He took a packet of potato crisps too.
“Trillian?” shouted Arthur in a shocked and weakened voice. In the smoking mess he could see nothing.
“Earthman, we must go,” said Slartibartfast nervously.
“Trillian?” shouted Arthur again.
A moment or two later, Trillian staggered, shaking, into view, supported by her new friend the Thunder God.
“The girl stays with me,” said Thor. “There's a great party going on in Valhalla, we'll be flying off…”
“Where were you when all this was going on?” said Arthur.
“Upstairs,” said Thor, “I was weighing her. Flying's a tricky business you see, you have to calculate wind…”
“She comes with us,” said Arthur.
“Hey,” said Trillian, “don't I…”
“No,” said Arthur, “you come with us.”
Thor looked at him with slowly smouldering eyes. He was making some point about godliness and it had nothing to do with being clean.
“She comes with me,” he said quietly.
“Come on, Earthman,” said Slartibartfast nervously, picking at Arthur's sleeve.
“Come on, Slartibartfast,” said Ford, picking at the old man's sleeve. Slartibartfast had the teleport device.
The party lurched and swayed, sending everyone reeling, except for Thor and except for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the Thunder God's black eyes.
Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what appeared to be his tiny little fists.
“Want to make something of it?” he said.
“I beg your minuscule pardon?” roared Thor.
“I said,” repeated Arthur, and he could not keep the quavering out of his voice, “do you want to make something of it?” He waggled his fists ridiculously.
Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of smoke curled upwards from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in it too.
He gripped his belt.
He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.