Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [54]
“Want to make something of it?” he said.
“I beg your minuscule pardon?” roared Thor.
“I said,” repeated Arthur, and he could not keep the quavering out of his voice, “do you want to make something of it?” He waggled his fists ridiculously.
Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of smoke curled upward from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in it, too.
He gripped his belt.
He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.
He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it up in his hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up a possible misunderstanding that he might merely have been carrying a telegraph pole around with him.
“Do I want,” he said, with a hiss like a river flowing through a steel mill, “to make something of it?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, his voice suddenly and extraordinarily strong and belligerent. He wagged his fists, again, this time as if he meant it.
“You want to step outside?” he snarled at Thor.
“All right!” bellowed Thor, like an enraged bull (or in fact like an enraged Thunder God, which is a great deal more impressive), and did so.
“Good,” said Arthur, “that’s got rid of him. Slarty, get us out of here.”
Chapter 23
ll right,” shouted Ford at Arthur, “so I’m a coward, the point is I’m still alive.” They were back aboard the starship Bistromath. So was Slartibartfast. So was Trillian. Harmony and concord were not.
“Well, so am I alive, aren’t I?” retaliated Arthur, haggard with adventure and anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if they wanted to punch each other.
“You damn nearly weren’t,” exploded Ford.
Arthur turned sharply to Slartibartfast, who was sitting in his pilot couch on the flight deck gazing thoughtfully into the bottom of a bottle that was telling him something he clearly couldn’t fathom. He appealed to him.
“Do you think he understands the first word I’ve been saying?” he said, quivering with emotion.
“I don’t know,” replied Slartibartfast, a little abstractedly. “I’m not sure,” he added, glancing up very briefly, “that I do.” He stared at his instruments with renewed vigor and bafflement. “You’ll have to explain it to us again,” he said.
“Well …”
“But later. Terrible things are afoot.”
He tapped the pseudoglass of the bottle bottom.
“We fared rather pathetically at the party, I’m afraid,” he said, “and our only hope now is to try to prevent the robots from using the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that I don’t know,” he muttered, “just have to go there, I suppose. Can’t say I like the idea at all. Probably end up dead.”
“Where is Trillian anyway?” said Arthur with a sudden affectation of unconcern. What he had been angry about was that Ford had berated him for wasting time over all the business with the Thunder God when they could have been making a rather more rapid escape. Arthur’s own opinion, and he had offered it for whatever anybody might have felt it was worth, was that he had been extraordinarily brave and resourceful.
The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys. What really hurt, though, was that Trillian didn’t seem to react much one way or the other and had wandered off somewhere.
“And where are my potato chips?” said Ford.
“They are both,” said Slartibartfast, without looking up, “in the room of Informational Illusions. I think that your young lady friend is trying to understand some problems of Galactic history. I think the potato chips are probably helping her.”
Chapter 24
t is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
For instance, there was once an insanely aggressive race of people called the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of their race. The name of their army was something quite horrific. Luckily they lived even farther back in Galactic history than anything we have so far encountered— twenty billion years ago—when the Galaxy