The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (47 page)

“Yes, a Chesterfield.”

“Have just materialized here in the middle of Lord’s Cricket Ground. But I don’t think they meant any harm, they’ve been very good-natured about it, and …”

“Sorry, can I interrupt you a moment, Peter, and say that the sofa has just vanished.”

“So it has. Well, that’s one mystery less. Still, it’s definitely one for the record books I think, particularly occurring at this dramatic moment in play, England now needing only twenty-four runs to win the series. The men are leaving the pitch in the company of a police officer, and I think everyone’s settling down now and play is about to resume.”

“Now, sir,” said the policeman after they had made a passage through the curious crowd and laid Arthur’s peacefully inert body on a blanket, “perhaps you’d care to tell me who you are, where you come from and what that little scene was all about?”

Ford looked at the ground for a moment as if steadying himself for something, then he straightened up and aimed a look at the policeman that hit him with the full force of every inch of the six light-years’ distance between Earth and Ford’s home near Betelgeuse.

“All right,” said Ford, very quietly, “I’ll tell you.”

“Yes, well, that won’t be necessary,” said the policeman hurriedly, “just don’t let whatever it was happen again.” The policeman turned around and wandered off in search of anyone who wasn’t from Betelgeuse. Fortunately, the cricket ground was full of them.

Arthur’s consciousness approached his body as from a great distance, and reluctantly. It had had some bad times in there. Slowly, nervously, it entered and settled down into its accustomed position.

Arthur sat up.

“Where am I?” he said.

“Lord’s Cricket Ground,” said Ford.

“Fine,” said Arthur, and his consciousness stepped out again for a quick breather. His body flopped back on the grass.

Ten minutes later, hunched over a cup of tea in the refreshment tent, the color started to come back to his haggard face.

“How you feeling?” asked Ford.

“I’m home,” said Arthur hoarsely. He closed his eyes and greedily inhaled the steam from his tea as if it were—well, as far as Arthur was concerned, as if it were tea, which it was.

“I’m home,” he repeated, “home. It’s England, it’s today, the nightmare is over.” He opened his eyes again and smiled serenely. “I’m where I belong,” he said in an emotional whisper.

“There are two things I feel I should tell you,” said Ford, tossing a copy of the
Guardian
over the table at him.

“I’m home,” said Arthur.

“Yes,” said Ford. “One is,” he said, pointing at the date at the top of the paper, “that the Earth will be demolished in two days’ time.”

“I’m home,” said Arthur, “tea,” he said, “cricket,” he added, with pleasure, “mown grass, wooden benches, white linen jackets, beer cans.…”

Slowly he began to focus on the newspaper. He cocked his head on one side with a slight frown.

“I’ve seen that one before,” he said. His eyes wandered slowly up to the date, which Ford was idly tapping at. His face froze for a second or two and then began to do that terribly slow crashing trick that Arctic ice floes do so spectacularly in the spring.

“And the other thing,” said Ford, “is that you appear to have a bone in your beard.” He tossed back his tea.

Outside the refreshment tent, the sun was shining on a happy crowd. It shone on white hats and red faces. It shone on Popsicles and melted them. It shone on the tears of small children whose Popsicles had just melted and fallen off the stick. It shone on the trees, it flashed off whirling cricket bats, it gleamed off the utterly extraordinary object that was parked behind the sight screens and that nobody appeared to have noticed. It beamed on Ford and Arthur as they emerged blinking from the refreshment tent and surveyed the scene around them.

Arthur was shaking.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I should …”

“No,” said Ford, sharply.

“What?” said Arthur.

“Don’t try and phone yourself up at home.”

“How did you know …?”

Ford shrugged.

“But why not?” said Arthur.

“People who talk to themselves on the phone,” said Ford, “never learn anything to their advantage.”

“But …”

“Look,” said Ford. He picked up an imaginary phone and dialed an imaginary dial.

“Hello?” he said into the imaginary mouthpiece. “Is that Arthur Dent? Ah, hello, yes. This is Arthur Dent speaking. Don’t hang up.”

He looked at the imaginary phone in disappointment.

“He hung up,” he said, shrugged and put the imaginary phone neatly back on its imaginary hook.

“This is not my first temporal anomaly,” he added.

A glummer look replaced the already glum look on Arthur Dent’s face.

“So we’re not home and dry,” he said.

“We could not even be said,” replied Ford, “to be home and vigorously toweling ourselves off.”

The cricket game continued. The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball. The batsman swung and thwacked it behind him over the sight screens. Ford’s eyes followed the trajectory of the ball and jogged momentarily. He stiffened. He looked along the flight path of the ball again and his eyes twitched again.

“This isn’t my towel,” said Arthur, who was rummaging in his rabbit-skin bag.

“Shhh,” said Ford. He screwed his eyes up in concentration.

“I had a Golgafrinchan jogging towel,” continued Arthur; “it was blue with yellow stars on it. This isn’t it.”

“Shhh,” said Ford again. He covered one eye and looked with the other.

“This one’s pink,” said Arthur. “It isn’t yours, is it?”

“I would like you to shut up about your towel,” said Ford.

“It isn’t my towel,” insisted Arthur, “that is the point I am trying to …”

“And the time at which I would like you to shut up about it,” continued Ford in a low growl, “is now.”

“All right,” said Arthur, starting to stuff it back into the primitively stitched rabbit-skin bag. “I realize that it is probably not important in the cosmic scale of things, it’s just odd, that’s all. A pink towel suddenly, instead of a blue one with yellow stars.”

Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way that was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved. What he was doing was this. Regardless of the bemused stares it was provoking from his fellow members of the crowd gathered round the pitch, he was waving his hands in sharp movements across his face, ducking down behind some people, leaping up behind others, then standing still and blinking a lot. After a moment or two of this he started to stalk forward slowly and stealthily, wearing a puzzled frown of concentration, like a leopard that is not sure whether it’s just seen a half-empty tin of cat food half a mile away across a hot and dusty plain.

“This isn’t my bag either,” said Arthur suddenly.

Ford’s spell of concentration was broken. He turned angrily on Arthur.

“I wasn’t talking about my towel,” said Arthur. “We’ve established that it isn’t mine. It’s just that the bag into which I was putting the towel that is not mine is also not mine, though it is extraordinarily similar. Now personally, I think that that is extremely odd, especially as the bag was one I made myself on prehistoric Earth. These are also not my stones,” he added, pulling a few flat gray stones out of the bag. “I was making a collection of interesting stones and these are clearly very dull ones.”

A roar of excitement thrilled through the crowd and obliterated whatever it was that Ford said in reply to this piece of information. The cricket ball that had excited this reaction fell out of the sky and dropped neatly into Arthur’s mysterious rabbit-skin bag.

“Now I would say that that was also a very curious event,” said Arthur, rapidly closing the bag and pretending to look for the ball on the ground.

“I don’t think it’s here,” he said to the small boys who immediately clustered around him to join in the search; “it probably rolled off somewhere. Over there I expect.” He pointed vaguely in the direction in which he wished they would push off. One of the boys looked at him quizzically.

“You all right?” said the boy.

“No,” said Arthur.

“That why you got a bone in your beard?” said the boy.

“I’m training it to like being wherever it’s put.” Arthur prided himself on saying this. It was, he thought, exactly the sort of thing that would entertain and stimulate young minds.

“Oh,” said the small boy, putting his head on one side and thinking about it. “What’s your name?”

“Dent,” said Arthur, “Arthur Dent.”

“You’re a jerk, Dent,” said the boy, “a complete kneebiter.” The boy looked past him at something else, to show that he wasn’t in any particular hurry to run away, and then wandered off scratching his nose. Suddenly Arthur remembered that the Earth was going to be demolished again in two days’ time, and just this once didn’t feel too bad about it. Play resumed with a new ball, the sun continued to shine and Ford continued to jump up and down shaking his head and blinking.

“Something’s on your mind, isn’t it?” said Arthur.

“I think,” said Ford in a tone of voice that Arthur by now recognized as one that presaged something utterly unintelligible, “that there’s an S.E.P. over there.”

He pointed. Curiously enough, the direction he pointed in was not the one in which he was looking. Arthur looked in the one direction, which was toward the sight screens, and in the other, which was at the field of play. He nodded, he shrugged. He shrugged again.

“A what?” he said.

“An S.E.P.”

“An S …?”

“ … E.P.”

“And what’s that?”

“Somebody Else’s Problem,” said Ford.

“Ah, good,” said Arthur, and relaxed. He had no idea what all that was about, but at least it seemed to be over. It wasn’t.

“Over there,” said Ford, again pointing at the sight screens and looking at the pitch.

“Where?” said Arthur.

“There!” said Ford.

“I see,” said Arthur, who didn’t.

“You do?” said Ford.

“What?” said Arthur.

“Can you see,” said Ford patiently, “the S.E.P.?”

“I thought you said that was someone else’s problem.”

“That’s right.”

Arthur nodded slowly, carefully and with an air of immense stupidity.

“And I want to know,” said Ford, “if you can see it.”

“You do?”

“Yes!”

“What,” said Arthur, “does it look like?”

“Well, how should I know, you fool,” shouted Ford. “If you can see it, you tell me.”

Arthur experienced that dull throbbing sensation just behind the temples that was a hallmark of so many of his conversations with Ford. His brain lurked like a frightened puppy in its kennel. Ford took him by the arm.

“An S.E.P.,” he said, “is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what S.E.P. means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out; it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.”

“Ah,” said Arthur, “then that’s why …”

“Yes,” said Ford, who knew what Arthur was going to say.

“ … you’ve been jumping up and …”

“Yes.”

“ … down, and blinking …”

“Yes.”

“ … and …”

“I think you’ve got the message.”

“I can see it,” said Arthur, “it’s a spaceship.”

For a moment Arthur was stunned by the reaction this revelation provoked. A roar erupted from the crowd, and from every direction people were running and shouting, yelling, tumbling over one another in a tumult of confusion. He stumbled back in astonishment and glanced fearfully around. Then he glanced around again in even greater astonishment.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” said an apparition. The apparition wobbled in front of Arthur’s eyes, though the truth of the matter is probably that Arthur’s eyes were wobbling in front of the apparition. His mouth wobbled as well.

“W … w … w … w …” his mouth said.

“I think your team has just won,” said the apparition.

“W … w … w … w …” repeated Arthur, and punctuated each wobble with a prod at Ford Prefect’s back. Ford was staring at the tumult in trepidation.

“You are English, aren’t you?” said the apparition.

“W … 
W … W … W …
yes,” said Arthur.

“Well, your team, as I say, has just won. The match. It means they retain the Ashes. You must be very pleased. I must say, I’m rather fond of cricket, though I wouldn’t like anyone outside this planet to hear me saying that. Oh dear no.”

The apparition gave what might have been a mischievous grin, but it was hard to tell because the sun was directly behind him, creating a blinding halo around his head and illuminating his silver hair and beard in a way that was awesome, dramatic and hard to reconcile with mischievous grins.

“Still,” he said, “it’ll all be over in a couple of days, won’t it? Though as I said to you when we last met, I was very sorry about that. Still, whatever will have been, will have been.”

Arthur tried to speak, but gave up the unequal struggle. He prodded Ford again.

“I thought something terrible had happened,” said Ford, “but it’s just the end of the game. We ought to get out. Oh, hello, Slartibartfast, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, pottering, pottering,” said the old man gravely.

“That your ship? Can you give us a lift anywhere?”

“Patience, patience,” the old man admonished.

“Okay,” said Ford, “it’s just that this planet’s going to be demolished pretty soon.”

“I know that,” said Slartibartfast.

“And, well, I just wanted to make that point,” said Ford.

“The point is taken.”

“And if you feel that you really want to hang around a cricket pitch at this point …”

“I do.”

“Then, it’s your ship.”

“It is.”

“I suppose.” Ford turned away sharply at this point.