– Ah, well I’m not sure I believe that.
They sat down and composed their thoughts.
Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.
– Flat battery? - said Arthur.
– No, - said Ford, - there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space-time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it’s somewhere in our vicinity.
– Where?
Ford moved the device in a slow lightly bobbing semi-circle. Suddenly the light flashed.
– There! - said Ford, shooting out his arm. - There, behind that sofa!
Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisleycovered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.
– Why, - he said, - is there a sofa in that field?
– I told you! - shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. - Eddies in the space-time continuum!
– And this is his sofa, is it? - asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.
– Arthur! - shouted Ford at him, - that sofa is there because of the space-time instability I’ve been trying to get your terminally softened brain to get to grips with. It’s been washed out of the continuum, it’s space-time jetsam, it doesn’t matter what it is, we’ve got to catch it, it’s our only way out of here!
He scrambled rapidly down the rocky outcrop and made off across the field.
– Catch it? - muttered Arthur, then frowned in bemusement as he saw that the Chesterfield was lazily bobbing and wafting away across the grass.
With a whoop of utterly unexpected delight he leapt down the rock and plunged off in hectic pursuit of Ford Prefect and the irrational piece of furniture.
They careered wildly through the grass, leaping, laughing, shouting instructions to each other to head the thing off this way or that way. The sun shone dreamily on the swaying grass, tiny field animals scattered crazily in their wake.
Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.
The sofa bobbed this way and that and seemed simultaneously to be as solid as the trees as it drifted past some of them and hazy as a billowing dream as it floated like a ghost through others.
Ford and Arthur pounded chaotically after it, but it dodged and weaved as if following its own complex mathematical topography, which it was. Still they pursued, still it danced and span, and suddenly turned and dipped as if crossing the lip of a catastrophe graph, and they were practically on top of it. With a heave and a shout they leapt on it, the sun winked out, they fell through a sickening nothingness, and emerged unexpectedly in the middle of the pitch at Lord’s Cricked Ground, St John’s Wood, London, towards the end of the last Test Match of the Australian Series in the year 198-, with England needing only twenty-eight runs to win.
Chapter 3
Important facts from Galactic history, number one:
(Reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner’s Book of popular Galactic History.)
The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe.
Chapter 4
It was a charming and delightful day at Lord’s as Ford and Arthur tumbled haphazardly out of a space-time anomaly and hit the immaculate turf rather hard.
The applause of the crowd was tremendous. It wasn’t for them, but instinctively they bowed anyway, which was fortunate because the small red heavy ball which the crowd actually had been applauding whistled mere millimetres over Arthur’s head. In the crowd a man collapsed.
They threw themselves back to the ground which seemed to spin hideously around them.
– What was that? - hissed Arthur.
– Something red, - hissed Ford back at him.
– Where are we?
– Er, somewhere green.
– Shapes, - muttered Arthur. - I need shapes.
The applause of the crowd had been rapidly succeeded by gasps of astonishment, and the awkward titters of hundreds of people who could not yet make up their minds about whether to believe what they had just seen or not.
– This your sofa? - said a voice.
– What was that? - whispered Ford.
Arthur looked up.
– Something blue, - he said.
– Shape? - said Ford.
Arthur looked again.
– It is shaped, - he hissed at Ford, with his brow savagely furrowing, - like a policeman.
They remained crouched there for a few moments, frowning deeply. The blue thing shaped like a policeman tapped them both on the shoulders.
– Come on, you two, - the shape said, - let’s be having you.
These words had an electrifying effect on Arthur. He leapt to his feet like an author hearing the phone ring and shot a series of startled glanced at the panorama around him which had suddenly settled down into something of quite terrifying ordinariness.
– Where did you get this from? - he yelled at the policeman shape.
– What did you say? - said the startled shape.
– This is Lord’s Cricket Ground, isn’t it? - snapped Arthur. - Where did you find it, how did you get it here? I think, - he added, clasping his hand to his brow, - that I had better calm down. - He squatted down abruptly in front of Ford.
– It is a policeman, - he said, - What do we do?
Ford shrugged.
– What do you want to do? - he said.
– I want you, - said Arthur, - to tell me that I have been dreaming for the last five years.
Ford shrugged again, and obliged.
– You’ve been dreaming for the last five years, - he said.
Arthur got to his feet.
– It’s all right, officer, - he said. - I’ve been dreaming for the last five years. Ask him, - he added, pointing at Ford, - he was in it.
Having said this, he sauntered off towards the edge of the pitch, brushing down his dressing gown. He then noticed his dressing gown and stopped. He stared at it. He flung himself at the policeman.
– So where did I get these clothes from? - he howled.
He collapsed and lay twitching on the grass.
Ford shook his head.
