He tossed the small hard red ball from hand to hand, feeling its weight.
With a wonderful feeling of lightness and unconcern, he trotted off away from the wicket. A medium-fast pace, he decided, and measured a good long run-up.
He looked up into the sky. The birds were wheeling about it, a few white clouds scudded across it. The air was disturbed with the sounds of police and ambulance sirens, and people screaming and yelling, but he felt curiously happy and untouched by it all. He was going to bowl a ball at Lord’s.
He turned and pawed a couple of times at the ground with his bedroom slippers. He squared his shoulders, tossed the ball in the air and caught it again.
He started to run.
As he ran, he saw that standing at the wicket was a batsman.
Oh, good, he thought, that should add a little…
Then, as his running feet took him nearer, he saw more clearly. The batsman standing ready at the wicket was not one of the England cricket team. He was not one of the Australian cricket team. It was one of the robot Krikkit team. It was a cold, hard, lethal white killer-robot that presumably had not returned to its ship with the others.
Quite a few thoughts collided in Arthur Dent’s mind at this moment, but he didn’t seem to be able to stop running. Time seemed to be going terribly, terribly slowly, but still he didn’t seem to be able to stop running.
Moving as if through syrup, he slowly turned his troubled head and looked at his own hand, the hand which was holding the small hard red ball.
His feet were pounding slowly onwards, unstoppably, as he stared at the ball gripped in his helpless hand. It was emitting a deep red glow and flashing intermittently. And still his feet were pounding inexorably forward.
He looked at the Krikkit robot again standing implacably still and purposefully in front of him, battleclub raised in readiness. Its eyes were burning with a deep cold fascinating light, and Arthur could not move his own eyes from them. He seemed to be looking down a tunnel at them - nothing on either side seemed to exist.
Some of the thoughts which were colliding in his mind at this time were these:
He felt a hell of a fool.
He felt that he should have listened rather more carefully to a number of things he had heard said, phrases which now pounded round in his mind as his feet pounded onwards to the point where he would inevitably release the ball to the Krikkit robot, who would inevitably strike it.
He remembered Hactar saying, “Have I failed? Failure doesn’t bother me.”
He remembered the account of Hactar’s dying words, “What’s done is done, I have fulfilled my function.”
He remembered Hactar saying that he had managed to make “a few things.”
He remembered the sudden movement in his hold-all that had made him grip it tightly to himself when he was in the Dust Cloud.
He remembered that he had travelled back in time a couple of days to come to Lord’s again.
He also remembered that he wasn’t a very good bowler.
He felt his arm coming round, gripping tightly on to the ball which he now knew for certain was the supernova bomb that Hactar had built himself and planted on him, the bomb which would cause the Universe to come to an abrupt and premature end.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
He would feel very, very embarrassed meeting everybody.
He hoped, he hoped, he hoped that his bowling was as bad as he remembered it to be, because that seemed to be the only thing now standing between this moment and universal oblivion.
He felt his legs pounding, he felt his arm coming round, he felt his feet connecting with the airline hold-all he’d stupidly left lying on the ground in front of him, he felt himself falling heavily forward but, having his mind so terribly full of other things at this moment, he completely forgot about hitting the ground and didn’t.
Still holding the ball firmly in his right hand he soared up into the air whimpering with surprise.
He wheeled and whirled through the air, spinning out of control.
He twisted down towards the ground, flinging himself hectically through the air, at the same time hurling the bomb harmlessly off into the distance.
He hurtled towards the astounded robot from behind. It still had its multi-functional battleclub raised, but had suddenly been deprived of anything to hit.
With a sudden mad access of strength, he wrestled the battleclub from the grip of the startled robot, executed a dazzling banking turn in the air, hurtled back down in a furious power-drive and with one crazy swing knocked the robot’s head from the robot’s shoulders.
– Are you coming now? - said Ford.
Epilogue:
Life, the Universe and Everything
And at the end they travelled again.
There was a time when Arthur Dent would not. He said that the Bistromathic Drive had revealed to him that time and distance were one, that mind and Universe were one, that perception and reality were one, and that the more one travelled the more one stayed in one place, and that what with one thing and another he would rather just stay put for a while and sort it all out in his mind, which was now at one with the Universe so it shouldn’t take too long, and he could get a good rest afterwards, put in a little flying practice and learn to cook which he had always meant to do. The can of Greek olive oil was now his most prized possession, and he said that the way it had unexpectedly turned up in his life had again given him a certain sense of the oneness of things which made him feel that…
He yawned and fell asleep.
In the morning as they prepared to take him to some quiet and idyllic planet where they wouldn’t mind him talking like that they suddenly picked up a computer-driven distress call and diverted to investigate.
A small but apparently undamaged spacecraft of the Merida class seemed to be dancing a strange little jig through the void. A brief computer scan revealed that the ship was fine, its computer was fine, but that its pilot was mad.
– Half-mad, half-mad, - the man insisted as they carried him, raving, aboard.
He was a journalist with the Siderial Daily Mentioner. They sedated him and sent Marvin in to keep him company until he promised to try and talk sense.
– I was covering a trial, - he said at last, - on Argabuthon.
He pushed himself up on to his thin wasted shoulders, his eyes stared wildly. His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it knew in the next room.
– Easy, easy, - said Ford. Trillian put a soothing hand on his shoulder.
The man sank back down again and stared at the ceiling of the ship’s sick bay.
– The case, - he said, - is now immaterial, but there was a witness… a witness… a man called… called Prak. A strange and difficult man. They were eventually forced to administer a drug to make him tell the truth, a truth drug.
His eyes rolled helplessly in his head.
– They gave him too much, - he said in a tiny whimper. - They gave him much too much. - He started to cry. - I thing the robots must have jogged the surgeon’s arm.
– Robots? - said Zaphod sharply. - What robots?
– Some white robots, - whispered the man hoarsely, - broke into the courtroom and stole the judge’s sceptre, the Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice, nasty Perspex thing. I don’t know why they wanted it. - He began to cry again. - And I think they jogged the surgeon’s arm…
He shook his head loosely from side to side, helplessly, sadly, his eyes screwed up in pain.
