Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [5]
“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.
Chapter 3
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