Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [71]
Ford frowned. “Don’t think so,” he said. He pulled out his own battered old copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and accessed it. “Any funny spelling?” he said.
“Don’t know. I’ve only ever heard it said, and that was by someone who had a mouthful of other people’s teeth. You remember I told you about Agrajag?”
Ford thought for a moment. “You mean the guy who was convinced you were getting him killed over and over again?”
“Yes. One of the places he claimed I’d got him killed was Stavromula Beta. Someone tries to shoot me, it seems. I duck and Agrajag, or at least one of his many reincarnations, gets hit. It seems that this has definitely happened at some point in time, so, I suppose, I can’t get killed at least until after I’ve ducked on Stavromula Beta. Only no one’s ever heard of it.”
“Hmm.” Ford tried a few other searches of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but drew a blank.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I was just … no, I’ve never heard of it,” said Ford, finally. He wondered why it was ringing a very, very faint bell, though.
“Okay,” said Arthur. “I’ve seen the way the Lamuellan hunters trap Perfectly Normal Beasts. If you spear one in the herd it just gets trampled, so they have to lure them out one at a time for the kill. It’s very like the way a matador works, you know, with a brightly colored cape. You get one to charge at you and then step aside and execute a rather elegant swing through with the cape. Have you got anything like a brightly colored cape about you?”
“This do?” said Ford, handing him his towel.
Chapter 20
Leaping onto the back of a one-and-a-half-ton Perfectly Normal Beast migrating through your world at a thundering thirty miles an hour is not as easy as it might at first seem. Certainly it is not as easy as the Lamuellan hunters made it seem, and Arthur Dent was prepared to discover that this might turn out to be the difficult bit.
What he hadn’t been prepared to discover, however, was how difficult it was even getting to the difficult bit. It was the bit that was supposed to be the easy bit that turned out to be practically impossible.
They couldn’t even catch the attention of a single animal. The Perfectly Normal Beasts were so intent on working up a good thunder with their hooves, heads down, shoulders forward, back legs pounding the ground into porridge, that it would have taken something not merely startling but actually geological to disturb them.
The sheer amount of thundering and pounding was, in the end, more than Arthur and Ford could deal with. After they had spent nearly two hours prancing about doing increasingly foolish things with a medium-sized floral-patterned bath towel, they had not managed to get even one of the great beasts thundering and pounding past them to do so much as glance casually in their direction.
They were within three feet of the horizontal avalanche of sweating bodies. To have been much nearer would have been to risk instant death, chrono-logic or no chrono-logic. Arthur had seen what remained of any Perfectly Normal Beast which, as the result of a clumsy miss-throw by a young and inexperienced Lamuellan hunter, got speared while still thundering and pounding with the herd.
One stumble was all it took. No prior appointment with death on Stavromula Beta, wherever the hell Stavromula Beta was, would save you or anybody else from the thunderous, mangling, pounding of those hooves.
At last, Arthur and Ford staggered back. They sat down, exhausted and defeated, and started to criticize each other’s technique with the towel.
“You’ve got to flick it more,” complained Ford. “You need more follow-through from the elbow if you’re going to get those blasted creatures to notice anything at all.”
“Follow-through?” protested Arthur. “You need more suppleness in the wrist.”
“You need more after-flourish,” countered Ford.
“You need a bigger towel.”
“You need,” said another voice, “a pikka bird.”
“You what?”
The voice had come from behind them. They turned, and there, standing behind them in the