Note - A quick thank you to both Elven Kitten and Guardian Demon who both reassured me that there are people, indeed, reading my ravings and enjoying them. My gratitude to you two for giving me a much-needed confidence injection.
"I didn't ASK how much it was going to cost, I asked if you can fix it." a rather put-out Zaphod said as the mechanic stood in the engine room of the Heart Of Gold, studying the Improbability Drive's control panel and scratching under his chin thoughtfully with a lobster-like claw.
He hmmed. He prummed.
Zaphod glared.
"Well, I just don't know..." he said at last, scratching the back of his neck next. "Such primitive technology, I mean."
"Primitive?" Zaphod sputtered. "Its the first and only ship of its kind to be powered by the Improbability Drive and he calls it primitive!" he said to Trillian, Marvin, and Arthur who were playing the part of vigilant spectators. Mister Beeblebrox was feeling especially disagreeable after having argued with Trillian at length before grudgingly agreeing to seek somewhere to repair the problem if it would make her happy.
As luck would have it, the nearest repair establishment from where their last jaunt had left them was on a desolate little pile of dirt orbiting somewhere in the vicinity of Mintaka along with a decidedly-scummy strip mall that looked just as ignored as the tiny moon it had been built on. Loathe as Zaphod was to have to be laid up in such a place for any length of time, Trillian had argued that it was likely the safest to go somewhere, for once, where people wouldn't immediately recognize the illustrious president of the galaxy. He disliked boring places and disliked them even moreso when he thought no one would know him there.
So here they were, for what it was worth. Arthur had been about to helpfully remind Zaphod that the Improbability Drive had a tendancy to cross large spans of time as well as distance, but the mechanic beat him to speaking.
"Being the first and only doesn't make it state-of-the-art, sir." he said with a detached sort of patience as he prodded a clawtip at a large domed button without pressing it and then tapped the corner of the display, which still read 2:1. "But I think I can fix it." he said after another resonant prum. "I'll just need the access code to get inside of the panel and I'll get started straight away."
"Access code, right. Access code..." he drummed his fingers on the panel. One of his heads looked over his shoulder to Trillian who dutifully stepped forward and keyed in the numeric code that would make the hatch to the panel's inner workings open.
"Access denied!" Eddie's chipper voice reported.
"What do you mean 'access denied'?" Trillian asked, certain she'd entered it right.
"Sorry, gang, just doing my job!" the ship's computer replied. "Care to give it another go?"
She keyed it in again, more slowly and precisely this time.
"Hmm, nope." said Eddie. The mechanic scratched at his upper arm.
"Are you sure this is your ship?" he inquired, not sounding like he cared one way or the other. Trillian closed her eyes, opened them, and then tried one last time, taking very special care with each button.
"There you go!" Eddie chirped as the hatch popped open, revealing an enormous tangle of wires and circuitry. "Access granted!"
"Ever since the drive malfunctioned, nothing's been working right." Trillian explained impatiently.
"Always one for the understatement." Marvin muttered under his breath as the mechanic knelt and began to poke around at the panel's innards for the source of the problem. There was much hmming, prumming and even a parf or two as he assessed the situation.
"Well?" Zaphod prompted after roughly the eighth prum.
"You can't just rush into these things." he replied, clicking a claw at Zaphod in rebuke. "Especially not when there's an improbability rift to consider. There's no end to the number of things that could go wrong! Why, I could take this wire--" he began, seizing a blue wire at random. There was a brief flashpop of white light, like a camera's bulb, and when it cleared, Marvin and Trillian were nowhere to be seen. "---and then realize that it was not a good idea at all..." he finished.
It is said that any one being, no matter how wretched or insignificant, is fragmented into infinite paths and fates that would or could have befallen them. That is to say that someone who is living up to their full potential as a stockbroker might very well be living up to his true potential as the queen of France on another plane somewhere in the great field of improbability. He might also be living up to his true potential as a janitor in the lonely halls of one of the universe's great many school buildings.
It was in one of these great many alternate destinies that Marvin and Trillian found themselves. And it just so happened, against all odds, that fate had chosen not to separate them in the process. It had, however, seen fit to deposit them in the middle of nowhere with no clue or direction. God was not the only one who worked in mysterious ways.
"Zaphod?" Trillian asked when she'd blinked enough light out of her eyes to somewhat see what was going on. Not recieving an answer from him, she tried again. "Arthur?" No answer there either. "Ford?" The world around her, such as it was, slowly swam into focus. "Marvin...!" she called with an air of desperation in her voice.
"You don't need to yell." a familiar voice said directly behind her, making her jump and turn to see its owner standing there, still looking very much human and very much unimpressed. She supposed having -someone- there was better than having no one...even if he was the last person she'd thought to call for.
"Where are we? Do you know?" she asked, watching as he surveyed the greyish vacant land surrounding them with detached interest.
"No." Marvin said simply when he saw nothing that sparked recognition. "Horrid, though, isn't it?" She whirled away from him, deciding that his demeanor really wasn't what she needed at present as she trudged forward a few paces.
"Zaphod?" she called, hearing nothing but her own voice reverberating back at her. That wasn't promising.
"Not that you care what I have to say, but if this was the result of an improbability field, they could all be light years away. Dimensions, even." he piped up.
"Don't you think I know that?" she hissed over her shoulder at him as he remained stoic. Marvin found that he didn't much care for her when she was near panic. Humans were irrational enough as it was.
"Its hard to tell, really." he answered truthfully. "But what do I know, after all? My logic functions only lap yours by the thousands."
"Zaa-phood!" she called, hands cupped around her mouth. The "od" bounced around for a bit, having a great time of it, before eventually growing bored and traipsing off to amuse itself elsewhere. Trillian was what some would call a chaotic girl at best, fickle at worst. Which is why it didn't take her long to come to terms with the idea that she was, indeed, stranded. With Marvin. How hoopy. She let her hands drop lifelessly to her sides with a deep-chested sigh.
This was no way to spend a Tuesday quarter-past-noon.
"Perhaps we ought to go." Marvin suggested, looking off to the right.
"Go where?" Trillian demanded to know. "There's nothing here, Marvin, if you hadn't noticed."
"Then I suppose it won't matter much where we go if all of it is equally awful." he said, looking left next and not liking it any better than he had the right.
"Why go anywhere at all, then?" she asked, the wheels of her mind turning furiously as she tried to find them a way out of this situation. "We have no idea where we are or what could be out there."
"It just seems a shame to not make use of such spanning desolation by getting hopelessly lost in it." he replied dolefully. She narrowed her eyes, still not looking at him. At least Zaphod would have given her the satisfaction of a decent argument in this situation.
Chuff, chuff, chuff
She turned her head in time to see Marvin beginning to wander off in a direction that he'd seemingly chosen at random, his boots scuffing on the gray-brown soil as he went. "Did you hear what I said?" she called after him.
"Yes." he murmured in his usual distantly-sad voice.
"Then where are you going?"
"Nowhere, I suspect."
She remained where she was, watching him with annoyance. Fine, she decided. Let him go, then. It was one less thing to trouble with.
"If it makes you feel any better..." Marvin stated as a parting shot. "...things seem to be exactly as dreadful over this way."
Not to mention things would be quieter. The chuffing became fainter and fainter as he trundled off, leaving her alone. It wasn't as though he couldn't take care of himself, after all...Marvin was millions of times her elder and had his ruddy brain the size of a planet to help him out. He'd be fine.
Except for the aggravating fact that she knew he wouldn't be. All of the logic functions in the damned universe couldn't program a robot with common sense or a survival instinct. They'd tried. Emotions could be easily replicated in androids and cybernetics, but instincts were trickier. They involved getting to know the Id, and the Id was the neurological equivalent of a crotchety old hermit who didn't want anyone walking on his lawn.
Even now, in his less-metal, more-vulnerable state of body, she doubted that he would put up much of a protest if something should come along that meant him harm. Knowing Marvin, he'd offer to save whatever it was the trouble by finding a nearby rock to dash out his brains on.
Trillian gritted her teeth, paced in a small circle for a moment, and then turned her back to the retreating figure. None of that made any difference or made him disappear any faster. She began to hum to herself to drown out the fading chuffs in the distance.
Ten green bottles
hanging on the wall
Ten green bottles
hanging on the wall
And if one green bottle
should accidently fall
There'd be nine green
bottles hanging on the wall.
She had gotten down to three green bottles before her resolve finally broke and she whirled on her heel to stalk off in the direction Marvin had gone. It might have been a long while before that wretched mechanic fixed whatever he'd caused to malfunction and brought them back, after all. There was no sense in doing something she might regret this early on.
In cases like this especially, one could never be too careful.
To say that there was nothing in this place was only a slight exaggeration. There was the sky, there was the ground, there was Trillian, and there was Marvin. That was all. There wasn't even a breath of wind to give things a bit of variety. It was, for all intents and purposes, like someone had encased everything in a glass jar and forgotten to punch airholes in the lid.
Marvin wondered vaguely how long it was he'd been walking, if for no other reason than for his own curiousity. Marking time was one of the few vices he'd not suffered himself to give up. There was little else to do for a creature who was used to waiting for very long periods of time, after all, and it was productive. Now that he lacked more precise apparatus to do so, it had become a frustrating venture. For all he knew he may only have been wandering for an hour or so when it felt like much more.
He was well-aware that Trillian was five paces behind him and had been for quite awhile, though she'd not spoken a word to him the entire time...then again, he'd not spoken a word to her either. He simply had nothing to say to her that he didn't think might make things worse, as though he ever had anything to say that made things better. Wherever they were, he found the landscape and everything in it to be annoyingly like he was: Dull, gray, joyless, and not worth noticing. He was sure Trillian would agree that one of him was quite enough for this universe if he were to ask...perhaps she'd go so far as to agree that the universe didn't need any of him at all, and he'd be inclined to agree.
"How long do you plan to keep walking, exactly?" the dark-haired girl asked, breaking the silence.
"Its only just becoming unbearable, why stop?" he countered.
"You're just going to keep going on until you collapse, then?"
"And then, perhaps, lay in the dirt awhile until I've recovered enough to do it all again. A few thousand years of it and I imagine one could get to enjoy it. If you find prolonged suffering enjoyable, of course, which I don't."
"Marvin..." she said warningly.
"If you want me to stop, you only need to say so." he informed her, not pausing in his slow lumbering gait. "You shouldn't bother yourself with me at all, though, it will only lead to disappointment." He wasn't surprised to hear the footsteps that had been chuffing in counterpoint to his own suddenly cease behind him.
"Stop." she told him as he obediantly came to a halt nine and three-quarter paces in front of her. "We're going to rest for a bit before we go any further." Trillian added, deciding that clearly authority needed to be taken. She wasn't especially good at ordering people around. She could suggest and ask with a certain flare, but commands had never been her strong point.
"Ah, is -that- what we're doing?" Marvin asked, making a great show of contempt for this news as he turned himself around and trudged back in her direction.
"Yes. That's what we're doing." she confirmed, seating herself in the dirt and watching as he seemed to seek out the most uncomfortable patch of ground he could find to slump down on in turn.
More silence.
"I'm not bothering you, am I?" he asked suddenly.
"No, Marvin." said Trillian.
"Because I can go away, you know. There's plenty of nothingness for me to disappear into. Or we could wait until the sun sets, if you prefer dramatic effect, and I could walk off into it." His head tilted upward at the bleak empty sky above them. "Pity there doesn't seem to be a sun."
"Marvin!" She stopped, collected herself, and tried again in a gentler tone, trying to summon some semblance of the usual reasonable lilt she used when dealing with all things Marvinish. "I don't want you to go away, all right? You're the only other person with me in this place--"
"Something I would not wish on anyone. Even myself, if I could avoid it." he interjected.
"--and we need to look after one another."
"Look after one another." he parroted. Had he still been a robot, his gears would have been whirring in irritation. "By that I suppose you mean that if we should run into something disagreeable, you'll escape whilest I hold it off."
She began to consider more seriously the option of simply going off alone. Trillian, even when she'd been Trisha, didn't do well by herself. She could survive, of course, but when given the option of company to solitude, she almost always opted for the former. "Almost" being the operative word in this case. Back on the ship, she'd gone to special pains to treat Marvin as though he were a person, simply for the fact that no one else could be bothered to. That and she thought that maybe, just maybe, if she had shown the dismal creature some kindness, he might become more agreeable over time.
"Its just as well. I can't help but think I missed my calling as scrap metal." he went on. "Surely there's a junkyard sculpture out there somewhere that pines for a few cogs and imput drive pieces to feel complete. Perhaps then I'd be appreciated."
"I think I'm ready to go on." she said quickly, standing up before he could continue.
"I don't blame you." he sighed.
"That means you too."
He groaned and struggled to his feet, gimping a bit on his left leg to make sure that the point was driven home.
"It can't all be nothing." she reasoned, brushing soil from the seat of her pants as she continued in the direction they'd been going.
"But it wouldn't surprise me in the least if it was." the woebegotten male said moodily.
"There's obviously oxygen, so there's SOME sort of atmosphere." Trillian argued, determined to remain optimistic as they plodded along. "We should come across something eventually. Water, plants, animals..."
"...a strip mall." Marvin muttered with great disinterest.
"A what?" she asked, not sure she'd heard correctly. Rather than bother himself with repeating his observation, he raised an arm with what looked to be great effort to point Southeast where, indeed, the familiar ghastly little line of buildings sat in the distance.
"I'm not sure I want to know how long you knew it was there." Trillian said when she'd recovered from her brief shock and unsure whether she wanted to feel contempt, relief, or a bit of both as she immediately started toward it.
"That's fine as I'm not sure I want to say." Marvin said to her retreating back. He stood where he was for a moment and then dutifully followed along behind her, not at all relishing the idea of being back in the presense of the others.