`This do?’ said Ford, handing him his towel.
20
Leaping on to the back of a one-and-a-half-ton Perfectly Normal Beast migrating through your world at a thundering thirty miles an hour is not as easy as it might at first seem. Certainly it is not as easy as the Lamuellan hunters made it seem, and Arthur Dent was prepared to discover that this might turn out to be the difficult bit.
What he hadn’t been prepared to discover, however, was how difficult it was even getting to the difficult bit. It was the bit that was supposed to be the easy bit which turned out to be practically impossible.
They couldn’t even catch the attention of a single animal. The Perfectly Normal Beasts were so intent on working up a good thunder with their hooves, heads down shoulders forward, back legs pounding the ground into porridge that it would have taken something not merely startling but actually geological to disturb them.
The sheer amount of thundering and pending was, in the end, more than Arthur and Ford could deal with. After they had spent nearly two hours prancing about doing increasingly foolish things with a medium-sized floral patterned bath towel, they had not managed to get even one of the great beasts thundering and pounding past them to do so much as glance casually in their direction.
They were within three feet of the horizontal avalanche of sweating bodies. To have been much nearer would have been to risk instant death, chrono-logic or no chrono-logic. Arthur had seen what remained of any Perfectly Normal Beast which, as the result of a clumsy mis-throw by a young and inexperienced Lamuellan hunter, got speared while still thundering and pound- ing with the herd.
One stumble was all it took. No prior appointment with death on Stavromula Beta, wherever the hell Stavromula Beta was, would save you or anybody else from the thunderous, mangling pounding of those hooves.
At last, Arthur and Ford staggered back. They sat down, exhausted and defeated, and started to criticise each other’s technique with the towel.
`You’ve got to flick it more,’ complained Ford. `You need more follow-through from the elbow if you’re going to get those blasted creatures to notice anything at all.’
`Follow-through?’ protested Arthur. `You need more supple- ness in the wrist.’
`You need more after-flourish,’ countered Ford.
`You need a bigger towel.’
`You need,’ said another voice, `a pikka bird.’
`You what?’
The voice had come from behind them. They turned, and there, standing behind them in the early morning sun, was Old Thrashbarg.
`To attract the attention of a Perfectly Normal Beast,’ he said, as he walked forward towards them, `you need a pikka bird. Like this.’
From under the rough, cassocky robe-like thing he wore he drew a small pikka bird. It sat restlessly on Old Thrashbarg’s hand and peered intently at Bob knows what darting around about three feet six inches in front of it.
Ford instantly went into the sort of alert crouch he liked to do when he wasn’t quite sure what was going on or what he ought to do about it. He waved his arms around very slowly in what he hoped was an ominous manner.
`Who is this?’ he hissed.
`It’s just Old Thrashbarg,’ said Arthur quietly. `And I wouldn’t bother with all the fancy movements. He’s just as experienced a bluffer as you are. You could end up dancing around each other all day.’
`The bird,’ hissed Ford again. `What’s the bird?’
`It’s just a bird!’ said Arthur impatiently. `It’s like any other bird. It lays eggs and goes ark at things you can’t see. Or kar or rit or something.’
`Have you seen one lay eggs?’ said Ford, suspiciously.
`For heaven’s sake of course I have,’ said Arthur. `And I’ve eaten hundreds of them. Make rather a good omelette. The secret is little cubes of cold butter and then whipping it lightly with…’
`I don’t want a zarking recipe,’ said Ford. `I just want to be sure it’s a real bird and not some kind of multi-dimensional cybernightmare.’
He slowly stood up from his crouched position and started to brush himself down. He was still watching the bird, though.