Chapter 39
rthur Dent was irritated to be continually wakened by the sound of gunfire.
Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was still managing to sleep fitfully, he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway that they had fashioned into a kind of bunk for themselves, slung himself down the access ladder, and prowled the corridors moodily.
They were claustrophobic and ill-lit. The lighting circuits buzzed annoyingly.
That wasn’t it, though.
He paused and leaned backward as a flying power drill flew past him down the dim corridor with a screech, occasionally clanging against the walls like a confused bee.
That wasn’t it either.
He clambered through a bulkhead door and found himself in a large corridor. Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he walked toward the other.
He came to an observation monitor let into the wall behind a plate of toughened but still badly scratched Plexiglas.
“Would you turn it down please?” he asked Ford Prefect who was crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video equipment he’d taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court Road, having first hurled a small brick through it, and also a heap of empty beer cans.
“Shhhh!” hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at the screen. He was watching The Magnificent Seven.
“Just a bit,” said Arthur.
“No!” shouted Ford. “We’re just getting to the good bit! Listen, I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion, everything, and this is the good bit!”
With a sigh and a headache, Arthur sat down beside him and watched the good bit. He listened to Ford’s whoops and yells and yeeehays as placidly as he could.
“Ford,” he said eventually, when it was all over, and Ford was hunting through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca, “how come, if…”
“This is the big one,” said Ford. “This is the one I came back for. Do you realize I never saw it all the way through? I always missed the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came. When they blew the place up I thought I’d never get to see it. Hey, what happened with all that anyway?”
“Just life,” said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.
“Oh, that again,” said Ford. “I thought it might be something like that. I prefer this stuff,” he said as Rick’s bar flickered onto the screen. “How come if what?”
“You started to say, ‘How come if…’”
“How come if you’re so rude about the Earth, that you … Oh, never mind, let’s just watch the movie.”
“Exactly,” said Ford.