Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [70]
“Sorry, I was nodding off for a moment. Something about the Universe, yes?”
“Something about the Universe, yes,” said Ford, wearily. He sat down again.
“All right,” he said. “Think about this. You know who I think I saw at the Guide offices? Vogons. Ah. I see I’ve said a word you understand at last.”
Arthur leapt to his feet.
“That noise,” he said.
“What noise?”
“The thunder.”
“What about it?”
“It isn’t thunder. It’s the spring migration of the Perfectly Normal Beasts. It’s started.”
“What are these animals you keep on about?”
“I don’t keep on about them. I just put bits of them in sandwiches.”
“Why are they called Perfectly Normal Beasts?” Arthur told him.
It wasn’t often that Arthur had the pleasure of seeing Ford’s eyes open wide with astonishment.
Chapter 19
It was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of. He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and when at last they reached the margin of the plains, they pulled themselves up into the branches of a large tree, to get a better view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the Galaxy has to offer.
The great thunderous herd of thousand upon thousand of Perfectly Normal Beasts was sweeping in magnificent array across the Anhondo Plain. In the early pale light of the morning, as the great animals charged through the fine steam of the sweat of their bodies mingled with the muddy mist churned up by their pounding hooves, their appearance seemed a little unreal and ghostly anyway, but what was heart-stopping about them was where they came from and where they went to, which appeared to be, simply, nowhere.
They formed a solid, charging phalanx roughly a hundred yards wide and half a mile long. The phalanx never moved, except that it exhibited a slight gradual drift sideways and backward for the eight or nine days that it regularly appeared for. But though the phalanx stayed more or less constant, the great beasts of which it was composed charged steadily at upward of twenty miles an hour, appearing suddenly from thin air at one end of the plain, and disappearing equally abruptly at the other end.
No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately said that this was the only properly wise thing that they’d ever heard Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put it down to chance.
The noise of the pounding of the hooves was so intense that it was hard to hear anything else above it.
“What did you say?” shouted Arthur.
“I said,” shouted Ford, “this looks like it might be some kind of evidence of dimensional drift.”
“Which is what?” shouted Arthur back.
“Well, a lot of people are beginning to worry that space-time is showing signs of cracking up with everything that’s happening to it. There are quite a lot of worlds where you can see how the landmasses have cracked up and moved around just from the weirdly long or meandering routes that migrating animals take. This might be something like that. We live in twisted times. Still, in the absence of a decent spaceport …”
Arthur looked at him in a kind of frozen way.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” shouted Ford. “You know perfectly well what I mean. We’re going to ride our way out of here.”
“Are you seriously suggesting we try to ride a Perfectly Normal Beast?”
“Yeah. See where it goes to.”
“We’ll be killed! No,” said Arthur, suddenly. “We won’t be killed. At least I won’t.