The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (46 page)

“Er, yes,” said Arthur. He felt very strange. After nearly four years of total isolation he was so pleased and relieved to see Ford that he could almost cry. Ford was, on the other hand, an almost immediately annoying person.

“Very nice,” said Ford, in reference to Arthur’s cave. “You must hate it.”

Arthur didn’t bother to reply.

“Africa was very interesting,” said Ford. “I behaved very oddly there.”

He gazed thoughtfully into the distance.

“I took up being cruel to animals,” he said airily. “But only,” he added, “as a hobby.”

“Oh, yes,” said Arthur, warily.

“Yes,” Ford assured him. “I won’t disturb you with the details because they would …”

“What?”

“Disturb you. But you may be interested to know that I am single-handedly responsible for the evolved shape of the animal you came to know in later centuries as a giraffe. And I tried to learn to fly. Do you believe me?”

“Tell me,” said Arthur.

“I’ll tell you later. I’ll just mention that the
Guide
says …”

“The …?”

“Guide. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
You remember?”

“Yes. I remember throwing it in the river.”

“Yes,” said Ford, “but I fished it out.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t want you to throw it in again.”

“Fair enough,” admitted Arthur. “It says?”

“What?”

“The
Guide
says?”

“The
Guide
says that there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” He smiled weakly. He pointed at the knees of his trousers and held his arms up to show the elbows. They were all torn and worn through.

“I haven’t done very well so far,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “I’m very glad to see you again, Arthur,” he added.

Arthur shook his head in a sudden access of emotion and bewilderment.

“I haven’t seen anyone for years,” he said, “not anyone. I can hardly even remember how to speak. I keep forgetting words. I practice, you see. I practice by talking to … talking to … what are those things people think you’re mad if you talk to? Like George the Third.”

“Kings?” suggested Ford.

“No, no,” said Arthur, “the things he used to talk to. We’re surrounded by them, for heaven’s sake. I’ve planted hundreds myself. They all died. Trees! I practice by talking to trees. What’s that for?”

Ford still had his hand stuck out. Arthur looked at it with incomprehension.

“Shake,” prompted Ford.

Arthur did, nervously at first, as if it might turn out to be a fish. Then he grasped it vigorously with both hands in an overwhelming flood of relief. He shook it and shook it.

After a while Ford found it necessary to disengage. They climbed to the top of a nearby outcrop of rock and surveyed the scene around them.

“What happened to the Golgafrinchans?” asked Ford.

Arthur shrugged.

“A lot of them didn’t make it through the winter three years ago,” he said, “and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set off on a raft. History says that they must have survived.…”

“Huh,” said Ford, “well well.” He stuck his hands on his hips and looked around again at the empty world. Suddenly, there was about Ford a sense of energy and purpose.

“We’re going,” he said excitedly, and shivered with energy.

“Where? How?” said Arthur.

“I don’t know,” said Ford, “but I just feel that the time is right. Things are going to happen. We’re on our way.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper.

“I have detected,” he said, “disturbances in the wash.”

He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.

Arthur asked him to repeat what he had just said because he hadn’t quite understood his meaning. Ford repeated it.

“The wash?” said Arthur.

“The space-time wash,” said Ford and, as the wind blew briefly past at that moment, he bared his teeth into it.

Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.

“Are we talking about,” he asked cautiously, “some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?”

“Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.”

“Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he. Is he.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.

“What?” said Ford.

“Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly, then?” Ford looked angrily at him. “Will you listen?” he snapped.

“I have been listening,” said Arthur, “but I’m not sure it’s helped.”

Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as
slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from the telephone company accounts department.

“There seem …” he said, “to be some pools …” he said, “of instability … he said, “in the fabric …” he said.

Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing gown where Ford was holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a foolish remark.

“ … in the fabric of space-time,” he said.

“Ah, that,” said Arthur.

“Yes, that,” confirmed Ford.

They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and stared each other resolutely in the face.

“And it’s done what?” said Arthur.

“It,” said Ford, “has developed pools of instability.”

“Has it,” said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment.

“It has,” said Ford, with a similar degree of ocular immobility.

“Good,” said Arthur.

“See?” said Ford.

“No,” said Arthur.

There was a quiet pause.

“The difficulty with this conversation,” said Arthur after a sort of ponderous look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky outcrop, “is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. They weren’t like this. Except perhaps some of the ones I’ve had with elms that sometimes got a bit bogged down.”

“Arthur,” said Ford.

“Hello? Yes?” said Arthur.

“Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.”

“Ah, well, I’m not sure I believe that.”

They sat down and composed their thoughts.

Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.

“Flat battery?” said Arthur.

“No,” said Ford, “there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space-time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it’s somewhere in our vicinity.”

“Where?”

Ford moved the device in a slow, lightly bobbing semicircle. Suddenly the light flashed.

“There!” said Ford, shooting out his arm; “there, behind that sofa!”

Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.

“Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”

“I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”

“And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

“Arthur!” shouted Ford at him, “that sofa is there because of the space-time instability I’ve been trying to get your terminally softened brain to come to grips with. It’s been washed up out of the continuum, it’s space-time jetsam, it doesn’t matter what it is, we’ve got to catch it, it’s our only way out of here!”

He scrambled rapidly down the rocky outcrop and made off across the field.

“Catch it?” muttered Arthur, then frowned in bemusement as he saw that the Chesterfield was lazily bobbing and wafting away across the grass.

With a whoop of utterly unexpected delight he leaped down the rock and plunged off in hectic pursuit of Ford Prefect and the irrational piece of furniture.

They careened wildly through the grass, leaping, laughing, shouting instructions to each other to head the thing off this way or that way. The sun shone dreamily on the swaying grass, tiny field animals scattered crazily in their wake.

Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

The sofa bobbed this way and that and seemed simultaneously to be as solid as the trees as it drifted past some of them and hazy as a billowing dream as it floated like a ghost through others.

Ford and Arthur pounded chaotically after it, but it dodged and weaved as if following its own complex mathematical topography, which it was. Still they pursued, still it danced and spun, and suddenly turned and dipped as if crossing the lip of a catastrophe graph, and they were practically on top of it. With a heave and a shout they leaped on it, the sun winked out, they fell through a sickening nothingness and emerged unexpectedly in the middle of the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground, St. John’s Wood, London, toward the end of the last Test Match of the Australian series in the year 198-, with England only needing twenty-eight runs to win.

Important Fact from Galactic History, Number One: (reproduced from the
Siderial Daily Mentioner’s Book of Popular Galactic History)

The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe.

I
t was a charming and delightful day at Lord’s as Ford and Arthur tumbled haphazardly out of a space-time anomaly and hit the immaculate turf rather hard.

The applause of the crowd was tremendous. It wasn’t for them, but instinctively they bowed anyway, which was fortunate because the small red heavy ball that the crowd actually had been applauding whistled mere inches over Arthur’s head. They threw themselves back to the ground that seemed to spin hideously around them.

“What was that?” hissed Arthur.

“Something red,” hissed Ford back at him.

“Where are we?”

“Er, somewhere green.”

“Shapes,” muttered Arthur, “I need shapes.”

The applause of the crowd had been rapidly succeeded by gasps of astonishment, and the awkward titters of hundreds of people who could not yet make up their minds whether to believe what they had just seen or not.

“This your sofa?” said a voice.

“What was that?” whispered Ford.

Arthur looked up.

“Something blue,” he said.

“Shape?” asked Ford.

Arthur looked again.

“It is shaped,” he hissed at Ford, with his brow savagely furrowed, “like a policeman.”

They remained crouched there for a few moments, frowning deeply. The blue thing shaped like a policeman tapped them both on the shoulders.

“Come on, you two,” the shape said, “let’s go.”

These words had an electrifying effect on Arthur. He leaped to his feet and shot a series of startled glances at the panorama around him that had suddenly settled down into something of quite terrifying ordinariness.

“Where did you get this from?” he yelled at the policeman shape.

“What did you say?” said the startled shape.

“This is Lord’s Cricket Ground, isn’t it?” snapped Arthur. “Where did you find it, how did you get it here? I think,” he added, clasping his hand to his brow, “that I had better calm down.” He squatted down abruptly in front of Ford.

“It is a policeman,” he said. “What do we do?”

Ford shrugged. “What do you want to do?” he said.

“I want you,” said Arthur, “to tell me that I have been dreaming for the last five years.”

Ford shrugged again, and obliged.

“You’ve been dreaming for the last five years,” he said.

Arthur got to his feet.

“It’s all right, officer,” he said, “I’ve been dreaming for the last five years. Ask him,” he added, pointing at Ford, “he was in it.” Having said this, he sauntered off toward the edge of the pitch, brushing down his dressing gown. He then noticed his dressing gown and stopped. He stared at it. He turned around. He flung himself at the policeman.

“So where did I get these clothes from?” he howled.

He collapsed and lay twitching on the grass.

Ford shook his head.

“He’s had a bad two million years,” he said to the policeman, and together they heaved Arthur onto the sofa and carried him off the pitch and were only briefly hampered by the sudden disappearance of the sofa on the way.

Reactions to all this from the crowd were many and various. Most of them couldn’t cope with watching it, and listened to it on the radio instead.

“Well, this is an interesting incident, Brian,” said one radio commentator to another. “I don’t think there have been any mysterious materializations on the pitch since, oh, since, well, I don’t think there have been any, have there? That I recall?”

“Edgbaston 1932?”

“Ah, now what happened then …?”

“Well, Peter, I think it was Canter facing Willcox coming up to bowl from the pavilion end when a spectator suddenly ran straight across the pitch.’

There was a pause while the first commentator considered this.

“Ye … e … s …” he said, “yes, there’s nothing actually very mysterious about that, is there? He didn’t actually materialize, did he? Just ran on.”

“No, that’s true, but he did claim to have
seen
something materialize on the pitch.”

“Ah, did he.”

“Yes. An alligator, I think, of some description.”

“And what happened to the man?”

“Well, I think someone offered to take him off and give him some lunch, but he explained that he’d already had a rather good one, so the matter was dropped and Warwickshire went on to win by three wickets.”

“So, not very like this current instance. For those of you who’ve just tuned in, you may be interested to know that, er … two men, two rather scruffily attired men, and indeed a sofa—a Chesterfield I think?”