Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [8]
“This isn’t my towel,” said Arthur, who was rummaging in his rabbit-skin bag.
“Shhh,” said Ford. He screwed his eyes up in concentration.
“I had a Golgafrinchan jogging towel,” continued Arthur; “it was blue with yellow stars on it. This isn’t it.”
“Shhh,” said Ford again. He covered one eye and looked with the other.
“This one’s pink,” said Arthur. “It isn’t yours, is it?”
“I would like you to shut up about your towel,” said Ford.
“It isn’t my towel,” insisted Arthur, “that is the point I am trying to …”
“And the time at which I would like you to shut up about it,” continued Ford in a low growl, “is now.”
“All right,” said Arthur, starting to stuff it back into the primitively stitched rabbit-skin bag. “I realize that it is probably not important in the cosmic scale of things, it’s just odd, that’s all. A pink towel suddenly, instead of a blue one with yellow stars.”
Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way that was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved. What he was doing was this. Regardless of the bemused stares it was provoking from his fellow members of the crowd gathered round the pitch, he was waving his hands in sharp movements across his face, ducking down behind some people, leaping up behind others, then standing still and blinking a lot. After a moment or two of this he started to stalk forward slowly and stealthily, wearing a puzzled frown of concentration, like a leopard that is not sure whether it’s just seen a half-empty tin of cat food half a mile away across a hot and dusty plain.
“This isn’t my bag either,” said Arthur suddenly.
Ford’s spell of concentration was broken. He turned angrily on Arthur.
“I wasn’t talking about my towel,” said Arthur. “We’ve established that it isn’t mine. It’s just that the bag into which I was putting the towel that is not mine is also not mine, though it is extraordinarily similar. Now personally, I think that that is extremely odd, especially as the bag was one I made myself on prehistoric Earth. These are also not my stones,” he added, pulling a few flat gray stones out of the bag. “I was making a collection of interesting stones and these are clearly very dull ones.”
A roar of excitement thrilled through the crowd and obliterated whatever it was that Ford said in reply to this piece of information. The cricket ball that had excited this reaction fell out of the sky and dropped neatly into Arthur’s mysterious rabbit-skin bag.
“Now I would say that that was also a very curious event,” said Arthur, rapidly closing the bag and pretending to look for the ball on the ground.
“I don’t think it’s here,” he said to the small boys who immediately clustered around him to join in the search; “it probably rolled off somewhere. Over there I expect.” He pointed vaguely in the direction in which he wished they would push off. One of the boys looked at him quizzically.
“You all right?” said the boy.
“No,” said Arthur.
“That why you got a bone in your beard?” said the boy.
“I’m training it to like being wherever it’s put.” Arthur prided himself on saying this. It was, he thought, exactly the sort of thing that would entertain and stimulate young minds.
“Oh,” said the small boy, putting his head on the one side and thinking about it. “What’s your name?”
“Dent,” said Arthur, “Arthur Dent.”
“You’re a jerk, Dent,” said the boy, “a complete kneebiter.” The boy looked past him at something else, to show that he wasn’t in any particular hurry to run away, and then wandered off scratching his nose. Suddenly Arthur remembered that the Earth was going to be demolished again in two days’ time, and just this once didn’t feel too bad about it. Play resumed with