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.