Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [74]
“Go! Ride that Beast!” shouted Thrashbarg. His distant voice reverberated faintly in their ears. “Ride that Perfectly Normal Beast! Ride it, ride it!”
Ford shouted in Arthur’s ear, “Where did he say we were going?”
“He said something about a King,” shouted Arthur in return, holding on desperately.
“What King?”
“That’s what I said. He just said the King.”
“I didn’t know there was a the King,” shouted Ford. “Nor did I,” shouted Arthur back. “Except of course for the King,” shouted Ford. “And I don’t suppose he meant him.” “What King?” shouted Arthur.
The point of exit was almost upon them. Just ahead of them, Perfectly Normal Beasts were galloping into nothingness and vanishing.
“What do you mean, what King?” shouted Ford. “I don’t know what King. I’m only saying that he couldn’t possibly mean the King, so I don’t know what he means.”
“Ford, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So?” said Ford. Then with a sudden rush, the stars came on, turned and twisted around their heads, and then, just as suddenly, turned off again.
Chapter 21
Misty gray buildings loomed and flickered. They bounced up and down in a highly embarrassing way.
What sort of buildings were they?
What were they for? What did they remind her of?
It’s so difficult to know what things are supposed to be when you suddenly turn up unexpectedly on a different world, which has a different culture, a different set of the most basic assumptions about life, and also incredibly dull and meaningless architecture.
The sky above the buildings was a cold and hostile black. The stars, which should have been blindingly brilliant points of light this far from the sun, were blurred and dulled by the thickness of the huge shielding bubble. Perspex or something like it. Something dull and heavy anyway.
Tricia wound the tape back again to the beginning.
She knew there was something slightly odd about it.
Well, in fact, there were about a million things that were slightly odd about it, but there was one that was nagging at her and she hadn’t quite got it.
She sighed and yawned.
As she waited for the tape to rewind she cleared away some of the dirty polystyrene coffee cups that had accumulated on the editing desk and tipped them into the bin.
She was sitting in a small editing suite at a video production company in Soho. She had DO NOT DISTURB notices plastered all over the door and a block on all incoming calls at the switchboard. This was originally to protect her astonishing scoop, but now it was to protect her from embarrassment.
She would watch the tape all the way through again from the beginning. If she could bear to. She might do some fast forwarding here and there.
It was about four o’clock on Monday afternoon, and she had a kind of sick feeling. She was trying to work out what the cause of this slightly sick feeling was, and there was no shortage of candidates.
First of all, it had all come on top of the overnight flight from New York. The red-eye. Always a killer, that.
Then being accosted by aliens on her lawn and flown to the planet Rupert. She was not sufficiently experienced in that sort of thing to be able to say for sure that that was always a killer, but she would be prepared to bet that those who went through it regularly cursed it. There were always stress charts being published in magazines. Fifty stress points for losing your job. Seventy-five points for a divorce or changing your hairstyle and so on. None of them ever mentioned being accosted on your lawn by aliens and then being flown to the planet Rupert, but she was sure it was worth a few dozen