Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [41]
With the toe of his good foot he nudged and pried at the heel of the shoe on his hurting foot.
“Go up, damn you!” Ford muttered hopelessly to Colin, who was cheerily straining away but unable to rise. Ford worked away at the heel of his shoe.
He was trying to judge the timing, but there was no point. Just go for it. He only had one shot and that was it. He had now eased the back of his shoe down off his heel. His twisted ankle felt a little better. Well, that was good, wasn’t it?
With his other foot he kicked at the heel of the shoe. It slipped off his foot and fell through the air. About half a second later a rocket erupted up from the muzzle of its launcher, encountered the shoe falling through its path, went straight for it, hit it and exploded with a great sense of satisfaction and achievement.
This happened about fifteen feet from the ground.
The main force of the explosion was directed downward. Where, a second earlier, there had been a squad of InfiniDim Enterprises executives with a rocket launcher standing on an elegant terraced plaza paved with large slabs of lustrous stone cut from the ancient alabastrum quarries of Zentalquabula, there was now, instead, a bit of a pit with nasty bits in it.
A great wump of hot air welled up from the explosion, throwing Ford and Colin violently up into the sky. Ford fought desperately and blindly to hold on and failed. He turned helplessly upward through the sky, reached the peak of a parabola, paused and then started to fall again. He fell and fell and fell and suddenly winded himself badly on Colin, who was still rising.
He clasped himself desperately onto the small spherical robot. Colin slewed wildly through the air toward the tower of the Guide offices, trying delightedly to control himself and slow down.
The world spun sickeningly around Ford’s head as they spun and twisted around each other and then, equally sickeningly, everything suddenly stopped.
Ford found himself deposited dizzily on a window ledge.
His towel fell past and he grabbed at it and caught it.
Colin bobbed in the air inches away from him.
Ford looked around himself in a bruised, bleeding and breathless daze. The ledge was only about a foot wide and he was perched precariously on it, thirteen stories up.
Thirteen.
He knew they were thirteen stories up because the windows were dark. He was bitterly upset. He had bought those shoes for some absurd price in a store on the Lower East Side in New York. He had, as a result, written an entire essay on the joys of great footwear, all of which had been jettisoned in the “Mostly harmless” debacle. Damn everything.
And now one of the shoes was gone. He threw his head back and stared at the sky.
It wouldn’t be such a grim tragedy if the planet in question hadn’t been demolished, which meant that he wouldn’t even be able to get another pair.
Yes, given the infinite sideways extension of probability, there was, of course, an almost infinite multiplicity of planets Earth, but, when you come down to it, a major pair of shoes wasn’t something you could just replace by mucking about in multidimensional space-time.
He sighed.
Oh well, he’d better make the best of it. At least it had saved his life. For the time being.
He was perched on a foot-wide ledge thirteen stories up the side of a building and he wasn’t at all sure that that was worth a good shoe.
He stared in woozily through the darkened glass.
It was as dark and silent as a tomb.
No. That was a ridiculous thing to think. He’d been to some great parties in tombs.
Could he detect some movement? He wasn’t quite sure. It seemed that he could see some kind of weird, flapping shadow. Perhaps it was just blood dribbling over his eyelashes. He wiped it away. Boy, he’d love to have a farm somewhere, keep some sheep. He peered into the window again, trying to make out what the shape was, but he had the feeling, so common in today’s universe, that he was looking into some kind of optical illusion and that his eyes were just playing silly buggers with him.
Was