The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams [71]
The crowd muttered to itself in annoyance. People as rich as they had suddenly become shouldn’t be obliged to listen to this sort of gibberish. Perhaps they could tip the fellow a leaf or two and he would go away.
They didn’t need to bother. Ford was already stalking out of the clearing, pausing only to shake his head at Number Two who was already firing his Kill-O-Zap into some neighboring trees.
He turned back once.
“Two million years!” he said and laughed.
“Well,” said the Captain with a soothing smile, “still time for a few more baths. Could someone pass me the sponge? I just dropped it over the side.
Chapter 33
Amile or so away through the wood, Arthur Dent was too busily engrossed with what he was doing to hear Ford Prefect approach.
What he was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on a wide flat piece of rock he had scratched out the shape of a large square, subdivided into one hundred and sixty-nine smaller squares, thirteen to a side.
Furthermore he had collected together a pile of smallish flattish stones and scratched the shape of a letter on to each. Sitting morosely around the rock were a couple of the surviving local native men to whom Arthur Dent was trying to introduce the curious concept embodied in these stones.
So far they had not done well. They had attempted to eat some of them, bury others and throw the rest of them away. Arthur had finally encouraged one of them to lay a couple of stones on the board he had scratched out, which was not even as far as he’d managed to get the day before. Along with the rapid deterioration in the morale of these creatures, there seemed to be a corresponding deterioration in their actual intelligence.
In an attempt to egg them along, Arthur set out a number of letters on the board himself, and then tried to encourage the natives to add some more themselves.
It was not going well.
Ford watched quietly from beside a nearby tree.
“No,” said Arthur to one of the natives who had just shuffled some of the letters round in a fit of abysmal dejection. “Q scores ten you see, and it’s on a triple word score, so… look, I’ve explained the rules to you… no, no, look please, put down that jawbone… All right, we’ll start again. And try to concentrate this time.”
Ford leaned his elbow against the tree and his hand against his head.
“What are you doing, Arthur?” he asked quietly.
Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a feeling that all this might look slightly foolish. All he knew was that it had worked like a dream on him when he was a child. But things were different then, or rather would be.
“I’m trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble,” he said.
“They’re not cavemen,” said Ford.
“They look like cavemen.”
Ford let it pass.
“I see,” he said.
“It’s uphill work,” said Arthur wearily. “The only word they know is grunt and they can’t spell it.”
He sighed and sat back.
“What’s that supposed to achieve?” asked Ford.
“We’ve got to encourage them to evolve! To develop!” Arthur burst out angrily. He hoped that the weary sigh and then the anger might do something to counteract the overriding feeling of foolishness from which he was currently suffering. It didn’t. He jumped to his feet.
“Can you imagine what a world would be like descended from those… cretins we arrived with?” he said.
“Imagine?” said Ford, raising his eyebrows. “We don’t have to imagine. We’ve seen it.”
“But…” Arthur waved his arms about hopelessly.
“We’ve seen it,” said Ford, “there’s no escape.”
Arthur kicked at a stone.
“Did you tell them what we’d discovered?” he asked.
“Hmmmm?” said Ford, not really concentrating.
“Norway,” said Arthur. “Slartibartfast’s signature in the glacier. Did you tell them?”
“What’s the point?” said Ford. “What would it mean to them?”
“Mean?” said Arthur. “Mean? You know perfectly well what it means. It means that this planet is the Earth! It’s my home! It’s where I was born!