A slow smile spread over Random’s face.
`You bloody little thing. You’ve been winding me up!’
`As I said, anything is possible.’
Random laughed. `OK,’ she said. `Let’s try and go to Earth. Let’s go to Earth at some point on its, er…’
`Probability axis?’
`Yes. Where it hasn’t been blown up. OK. So you’re the Guide. How do we get a lift?’
`Reverse engineering.’
`What?’
`Reverse engineering. To me the flow of time is irrelevant. You decide what you want. I then merely make sure that it has already happened.’
`You’re joking.’
`Anything is possible.’
Random frowned. `You are joking aren’t you?’
`Let me put it another way,’ said the bird. `Reverse engineering enables us to shortcut all the business of waiting for one of the horribly few spaceships that passes through your galactic sector every year or so to make up its mind about whether or not it feels like giving you a lift. You want a lift a ship arrives and gives you one. The pilot may think he has any one of a million reasons why he has decided to stop and pick you up. The real reason is that I have determined that he will.’
`This is you being extremely vain isn’t it, little bird?’
The bird was silent.
`OK,’ said Random. `I want a ship to take me to Earth.’
`Will this one do?’
It was so silent that Random had not noticed the descending spaceship until it was nearly on top of her.
Arthur had noticed it. He was a mile away now and closing. Just after the illuminated sausage display had drawn to its conclusion he had noticed the faint glimmerings of further lights coming down out of the clouds and had, to begin with, assumed it to be another piece of flashy son et lumiere.
It took a moment or so for it to dawn on him that it was an actual spaceship, and a moment or two longer for him to realise that it was dropping directly down to where he assumed his daughter to be. That was when, rain or no rain, leg injury or no leg injury, darkness or no darkness, he suddenly started really to run.
He fell almost immediately, slid and hurt his knee quite badly on a rock. He slithered back up to his feet and tried again. He had a horrible cold feeling that he was about to lose Random for ever. Limping and cursing, he ran. He didn’t know what it was that had been in the box, but the name on it had been Ford Prefect, and that was the name he cursed as he ran.
The ship was one of the sexiest and most beautiful ones that Random had ever seen.
It was astounding. Silver, sleek, ineffable.
If she didn’t know better she would have said it was an RW6. As it settled silently beside her she realised that it actually was an RW6 and she could scarcely breathe for excitement. An RW6 was the sort of thing you only saw in the sort of magazines that were designed to provoke civil unrest.
She was also extremely nervous. The manner and timing of its arrival was deeply unsettling. Either it was the most bizarre coincidence or something very peculiar and worrying was going on. She waited a little tensely for the ship’s hatch to open. Her Guide – she thought of it as hers now – was hovering lightly over her right shoulder, its wings barely fluttering.
The hatch opened. Just a little dim light escaped. A moment or two passed and a figure emerged. He stood still for a moment or so, obviously trying to accustom his eyes to the darkness. Then he caught sight of Random standing there, and seemed a little surprised. He started to walk towards her. Then suddenly he shouted in surprise and started to run at her.
Random was not a good person to take a run at on a dark night when she was feeling a little strung out. She had unconsciously been fingering the rock in her pocket from the moment she saw the craft coming down.
Still running, slithering, hurtling, bumping into trees, Arthur saw at last that he was too late. The ship had only been on the ground for about three minutes, and now, silently, gracefully it was rising up above the trees again, turning smoothly in the fine speckle of rain to which the storm had now abated, climbing, climbing, tipping up its nose and, suddenly, effortlessly, hurtling up through the clouds.