After being stranded on pre-historic Earth after the events in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent is met by his old friend Ford Prefect, who drags him into a space-time eddy, represented by an anachronistic sofa. The two end up at Lord’s Cricket Ground two days before Earth will be destroyed by the Vogons. Shortly after they arrive, a squad of robots land in a spaceship in the middle of the field and attack the assembled crowd, stealing The Ashes before departing. Another spaceship, the Starship Bistromath, arrives, helmed by Slartibartfast, who discovers he is too late and requests Arthur and Ford’s help.

          As they travel to their next destination, Slartibartfast explains that he is trying to stop the robots from collecting all the components of the Wikkit Gate. Long ago, the peaceful population of the planet of Krikkit, unaware of the rest of the Universe due to a dust cloud that surrounded its solar system, were surprised to find the wreckage of a spacecraft on their planet. Reverse engineering their own vessel, they explored past the dust cloud and saw the rest of the Universe, immediately taking a disliking to it and determining it must go. They built a fleet of ships and robots to attack the rest of the Universe in a brutal onslaught known as the Krikkit Wars, but were eventually defeated. Realising that the Krikkit population would not be satisfied alongside the existence of the rest of the Universe, it was decided to envelop the system in a Slo-Time envelope, allowing Krikkit to survive long after the rest of the universe has ended; the Wikkit Gate was the key to the envelope. However, just before it was activated, one ship carrying a troop of robots escaped the envelope, and began to retrieve the pieces of the Gate after they were dispersed about space and time.