Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [67]
“Well, I fell over, of course. I was very badly hurt. She and the bird started to make off toward my ship. And when I say my ship, I mean an RW6.”
“A what?”
“An RW6, for Zark’s sake. I’ve got this great relationship going now between my credit card and the Guide’s central computer. You would not believe that ship, Arthur, it’s …”
“So an RW6 is a spaceship, then?”
“Yes! It’s-oh, never mind. Look, just get some kind of grip, will you, Arthur? Or at least get some kind of catalogue. At this point I was very worried. And, I think, semi-concussed. I was down on my knees and bleeding profusely, so I did the only thing I could think of, which was to beg. I said please, for Zark’s sake, don’t take my ship. And don’t leave me stranded in the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she.”
“What did she say?”
“She hit me on the head with the rock again.”
“I think I can confirm that that was my daughter.”
“Sweet kid.”
“You have to get to know her,” said Arthur.
“She eases up, does she?”
“No,” said Arthur, “but you get a better sense of when to duck.”
Ford held his head and tried to see straight.
The sky was beginning to lighten in the west, which was where the sun rose. Arthur didn’t particularly want to see it. The last thing he wanted after a hellish night like this one was some blasted day coming along and barging about the place.
“What are you doing in a place like this, Arthur?” demanded Ford.
“Well,” said Arthur, “making sandwiches mostly.”
“What?”
“I am, probably was, the sandwich maker for a small tribe. It was a bit embarrassing really. When I first arrived, that is, when they rescued me from the wreckage of this super high-technology spacecraft that had crashed on their planet, they were very nice to me and I thought I should help them out a bit. You know, I’m an educated chap from a high-technology culture, I could show them a thing or two. And of course I couldn’t. I haven’t got the faintest idea, when it comes down to it, of how anything actually works. I don’t mean like video recorders, nobody knows how to work those. I mean just something like a pen or an artesian well or something. Not the foggiest. I couldn’t help at all. One day I got glum and made myself a sandwich. That suddenly got them all excited. They’d never seen one before. It was just an idea that had never occurred to them, and I happen to quite like making sandwiches, so it all sort of developed from there.”
“And you enjoyed that?”
“Well, yes, I think I sort of did, really. Getting a good set of knives, that sort of thing.”
“You didn’t, for instance, find it mind-witheringly, explosively, astoundingly, blisteringly dull?”
“Well, er, no. Not as such. Not actually blisteringly.”
“Odd. I would.”
“Well, I suppose we have a different outlook.”
“Yes.”
“Like the pikka birds.”
Ford had no idea what he was talking about and couldn’t be bothered to ask. Instead he said, “So how the hell do we get out of this place?”
“Well, I think the simplest way from here is just to follow the way down the valley to the plains, probably take an hour, and then walk around from there. I don’t think I could face going back up and over the way I came.”
“Walk around where from there?”
“Well, back to the village, I suppose.” Arthur sighed a little forlornly.
“I don’t want to go to any blasted village!” snapped Ford. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Where? How?”
“I don’t know, you tell me. You live here! There must be some way off this zarking planet.”
“I don’t know. What do you usually do? Sit around and wait for a passing spacecraft, I suppose.”
“Oh, yes? And how many spacecraft have visited this zarkforsaken little flea-pit recently?”
“Well, a few years ago there was mine that crashed here by mistake. Then there was, er, Trillian, then the parcel delivery, and now you, and …”
“Yes, but apart from the usual suspects?”
“Well, er, I think pretty much none, so far as I know. Pretty quiet around here.”
As if deliberately to prove him wrong, there was