Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [60]
The flash of lethal light passed straight through Random and, about two seconds later, so did the man who had shot it. Other than that he paid her no attention whatsoever. He had shot someone standing behind her, and when she turned to look, he was kneeling over the body and going through its pockets.
The tableau froze and vanished. It was replaced a second later by a giant pair of teeth framed by immense and perfectly glossed red lips. A huge blue brush appeared out of nowhere and started, foamily, to scrub at the teeth, which continued to hang there gleaming in the shimmering curtain of rain.
Random blinked at it twice before she got it.
It was a commercial. The guy who had shot her was part of a holographic in-flight movie. She must now be very close to where the ship had crashed. Obviously some of its systems were more indestructible than others.
The next half-mile of the journey was particularly trouble some. Not only did she have the cold and the rain and the night to contend with, but also the fractured and thrashing remains of the ship’s on-board entertainment system. Spaceships and jetcars and helipods crashed and exploded continuously around her, illuminating the night, villainous people in strange hats smuggled dangerous drugs through her, and the combined orchestra and chorus of the Hallapolis State Opera performed the closing March of the AnjaQantine Star Guard from Act IV of Rizgar’s Blamwellamum of Woont in a little glade somewhere off to her left.
And then she was standing on the lip of a very nasty-looking and bubbly-edged crater. There was still a faint warm glow coming from what would otherwise have looked like an enormous piece of caramelized chewing gum in the center of the pit: the melted remains of a great spaceship.
She stood looking at it for a longish while, and then at last started to walk along and around the edge of the crater. She was no longer certain what she was looking for, but kept moving anyway, keeping the horror of the pit to her left.
The rain was beginning to ease off a little, but it was still extremely wet, and since she didn’t know what it was that was in the box, whether it was perhaps something delicate or damageable, she thought that she ought to find somewhere reasonably dry to open it. She hoped she hadn’t already damaged it by dropping it.
She played her torch around the surrounding trees, which were thin on the ground here, and mostly charred and broken. In the middle distance she thought she could see a jumbled outcrop of rock that might provide some shelter, and she started to pick her way toward it. All around she found the detritus that had been ejected from the ship as it broke up, before the final fireball.
After she had moved two or three hundred yards from the edge of the crater, she came across the tattered fragments of some fluffy pink material, sodden, muddied and drooping among the broken trees. She guessed, correctly, that this must be the remains of the escape cocoon that had saved her father’s life. She went and looked at it more closely, and then noticed something close to it on the ground, half-covered in mud.
She picked it up and wiped the mud off it. It was some kind of electronic device the size of a small book. Feebly glowing on its cover, in response to her touch, were some large friendly letters. They said DON’T PANIC. She knew what this was. It was her father’s copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
She felt instantly reassured by it, turned her head up to the thundery sky and let some rain wash over her face and into her mouth.
She shook her head and hurried on toward the rocks. Clambering up and over them, she almost immediately found the perfect thing. The mouth of a cave. She played her torch into its interior. It seemed to be dry and safe. Picking her way carefully, she walked in. It was quite spacious,