ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Life, the Universe

  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

  towelling ourselves off."

  The 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 which 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's 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

  that isn't mine. It's just that the bag into which I was putting the towel

  which 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 grey 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

  which 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 round 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.

  "Then 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 which would

  entertain and stimulate young minds.

  "Oh," said the small boy, putting his head to 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 asshole." 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 which Arthur by now recognized as

  one which presaged something utterly unintelligible, "that there's an SEP 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 towards

  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 SEP."

  "An S ...?"

  "... EP."

  "And what's that?"

  "Somebody Else's Problem."

  "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 SEP?"

  "I thought you said that was somebody 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

  which 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 SEP," 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 SEP 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,

  shouting, yelling, tumbling over each other 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 have 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, have 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 looked as if it might have been a mischievous

  grin, but it was hard to tell because the sun was directly behind him,

  creating a blinding halo round his head and illuminating his silver hair and

  beard in a way which 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.

  "OK," 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.

  "Hello, Slartibartfast," said Arthur at last.

  "Hello, Earthman," said Slartibartfast.

  "After all," said Ford, "we can only die once."

  The old man ignored this and stared keenly on to the pitch, with eyes that

  seemed alive with expressions that had no apparent bearing on what was

  happening out there. What was happening was that the crowd was gathering

  itself into a wide circle round the centre of the pitch. What Slartibartfast

  saw in it, he alone knew.

  Ford was humming something. It was just one note repeated at intervals. He

  was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. If

  anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a

  Noel Coward song called "Mad About the Boy" over and over again. It would then

  have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he

  would have replied that for reasons which he hoped would be apparent, he was

  omitting the "about the boy" bit. He was annoyed that nobody asked.

  "It's just," he burst out at last, "that if we don't go soon, we might get

  caught in the middle of it all again. And there's nothing that depresses me

  more than seeing a planet being destroyed. Except possibly still being on it

  when it happens. Or," he added in an undertone, "hanging around cricket

  matches."

  "Patience," said Slartibartfast again. "Great things are afoot."

  "That's what you said last time we met," said Arthur.

  "They were," said Slartibartfast.

  "Yes, that's true," admitted Arthur.

  All, however, that seemed to be afoot was a ceremony of some kind. It was

  being specially staged for the benefit of tv rather than the spectators, and

  all they could gather about it from where they were standing was what they

  heard from a nearby radio. Ford was aggressively uninterested.

  He fretted as he heard it explained that the Ashes were about to be

  presented to the Captain of the English team out there on the pitch, fumed

  when told that this was because they had now won them for the nth time,

  positively barked with annoyance at the information that the Ashes were the

  remains of a cricket stump, and when, further to this, he was asked to contend

  with the fact that the cricket stump in question had been burnt in Melbourne,

  Australia, in 1882, to signify the "death of English cricket", he rounded on

  Slartibartfast, took a deep breath, but didn't have a chance to say anything

  because the old man wasn't there. He was marching out on to the pitch with

  terrible purpose in his gait, his hair, beard and robes swept behind him,

  looking very much as Moses would have looked if Sinai had been a well-cut lawn

  instead of, as it is more usually represented, a fiery smoking mountain.

  "He said to meet him at his ship," said Arthur.

  "What in the name of zarking fardwarks is the old fool doing?" exploded

  Ford.

  "Meeting us at his ship in two minutes," said Arthur with a shrug which

  indicated total abdication of thought. They started off towards it. Strange

  sounds reached their ears. They tried not to listen, but could not help

  noticing that Slartibartfast was querulously demanding that he be given the

  silver urn containing the Ashes, as they were, he said, "vitally important for

  the past, present and future safety of the Galaxy", and that this was causing

  wild hilarity. They resolved to ignore it.

  What happened next they could not ignore. With a noise like a hundred

  thousand people saying "wop", a steely white spaceship suddenly seemed to

  create itself out of nothing in the air directly above the cricket pitch and

  hung there with infinite menace and a slight hum.

  Then for a while it did nothing, as if it expected everybody to go about

  their normal business and not mind it just hanging there.

  Then it did something quite extraordinary. Or rather, it opened up and let

  something quite extraordinary come out of it, eleven quite extraordinary

  things.

  They were robots, white robots.

  What was most extraordinary about them was that they appeared to have come

  dressed for the occasion. Not only were they white, but they carried what

  appeared to be cricket bats, and not only that, but they also carried what

  appeared to be cricket balls, and not only that but they wore white ribbing

  pads round the lower parts of their legs. These last were extraordinary

  because they appeared to contain jets which allowed these curiously civilized

  robots to fly down from their hovering spaceship and start to kill people,


  which is what they did

  "Hello," said Arthur, "something seems to be happening."

  "Get to the ship," shouted Ford. "I don't want to know, I don't want to

  see, I don't want to hear," he yelled as he ran, "this is not my planet, I

  didn't choose to be here, I don't want to get involved, just get me out of

  here, and get me to a party, with people I can relate to!"

  Smoke and flame billowed from the pitch.

  "Well, the supernatural brigade certainly seems to be out in force here

  today ..." burbled a radio happily to itself.

  "What I need," shouted Ford, by way of clarifying his previous remarks,

  "is a strong drink and a peer-group." He continued to run, pausing only for a

  moment to grab Arthur's arm and drag him along with him. Arthur had adopted

  his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let

  it all wash over him.

  "They're playing cricket," muttered Arthur, stumbling along after Ford. "I

  swear they are playing cricket. I do not know why they are doing this, but

  that is what they are doing. They're not just killing people, they're sending

  them up," he shouted, "Ford, they're sending us up!"

  It would have been hard to disbelieve this without knowing a great deal

  more Galactic history than Arthur had so far managed to pick up in his

  travels. The ghostly but violent shapes that could be seen moving within the

  thick pall of smoke seemed to be performing a series of bizarre parodies of

  batting strokes, the difference being that every ball they struck with their

  bats exploded wherever it landed. The very first one of these had dispelled

  Arthur's initial reaction, that the whole thing might just be a publicity

  stunt by Australian margarine manufacturers.

  And then, as suddenly as it had all started, it was over. The eleven white

  robots ascended through the seething cloud in a tight formation, and with a

  few last flashes of flame entered the bowels of their hovering white ship,

  which, with the noise of a hundred thousand people saying "foop", promptly

  vanished into the thin air out of which it had wopped.

  For a moment there was a terrible stunned silence, and then out of the

  drifting smoke emerged the pale figure of Slartibartfast looking even more

  like Moses because in spite of the continued absence of the mountain he was at

  least now striding across a fiery and smoking well-mown lawn.

  He stared wildly about him until he saw the hurrying figures of Arthur