Chapter 26 Chapter Twenty Six

"I don't know," said Zaphod. "It's like this. It's happened hundreds of times. They could have killed me, but they didn't. Maybe they just think I'm a nice guy. I understand." of." Everyone else decided not to comment. Zaphod lay on the cold cabin floor.He felt pain from head to toe.He moved on the ground. "I think," he said softly, "there's something wrong with those tin boys. Total monsters." "They were born to kill," Slartibartfast pointed out. "Ah," gasped Zaphod, "that's probably the question." He didn't really think about it.

"Hey baby," he called to Trillian, hoping to make up for what he had done. "Are you all right?" she asked softly. "Well," he said, "I'm fine." "That's good." She walked away.She came to the control panel, stared at the huge display screen, and turned a knob again.She is looking at the picture profile.One is a dark nebula, one is a star, and the other is a star.She flipped through the pictures viciously. "Is it time to say goodbye to the Milky Way?" Arthur pushed his knees and stood up. "No." Slarti Bartfast looked stern, "Our next step is clear." He frowned, frowning so much that he could plant a vegetable.He stood up and paced up and down.Tried to say something, but the content was terrible, so he sat down again.

"We have to go back to ask for stars." He sighed heavily, shaking his body, his face twitching a bit. "We failed again," he said. "We failed badly, pretty badly." "That's because," whispered Ford, "we weren't strong enough. I told you." He put his foot on the control panel and dug under his toenails. "But if we don't act," the old man grumbled, as if wrestling with the depths of his own being, "we're all lost. We're going to die. Is that firm enough?" "At least not to the point of wanting to die for it," replied Ford.He looked at everyone with a smirk.

Slartibartfas felt that this kind of view was extremely demagogic, and he should work hard to resist it.He turned to Zaphod, who was lying on the ground, grinning and sweating. "You should know," he asked, "why they let you go. It's the strangest thing." "I don't think they know it themselves." Zaphod shrugged. "As I said, they beat me as hard as possible. If I was knocked out, it counted. They dragged me into the spaceship, threw me aside, and let it go. As if I were embarrassing them there. They knocked me out again when I spoke. It was fun talking between us. 'Hey-ah!' 'Hi-ah!' 'I Think—ah!' I've played it so many times. You know." He twitched again.

He is holding something in his hand.When I lifted it up, it turned out to be the golden horizontal wood—the heart of gold, the core of the drive of infinite improbability.When the lock was blown, only this and the "wooden post" survived. "I heard your ship is fine," he said, "Can you send me back to my ship..." "Won't you help us?" Slartibartfast asked. "I really want to help you save the Milky Way," Zaphod propped up half of his body, and said solemnly, "but I still have my mother, my father, and two heads that hurt, and I have a hunch that there will be other places. Hurts. But next time the galaxy needs saving, I'm on call. Hey, Trillian baby?"

She turned around blankly. "Ok?" "You too? Heart of gold? Thrills, adventures, the craziest thing?" "I'm going to ask for stars," she said.