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 brokenbacked 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.