Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything

Outside the refreshment tent, the sun was shining on a happy crowd. It shone on white hats and red faces. It shone on ice lollies and melted them. It shone on the tears of small children whose ice lollies had just melted and fallen off the stick. It shone on the trees, it flashed off whirling cricket bats, it gleamed off the utterly extraordinary object which was parked behind the sight-screens and which nobody appeared to have noticed. It beamed on Ford and Arthur as they emerged blinking from the refreshment tent and surveyed the scene around them.

Arthur was shaking.

– Perhaps, - he said, - I should…

– No, - said Ford sharply.

– What? - said Arthur.

– Don’t try and phone yourself up at home.

– How did you know?…

Ford shrugged.

– But why not? - said Arthur.

– People who talk to themselves on the phone, - said Ford, - never learn anything to their advantage.

– But…

– Look, - said Ford. He picked up an imaginary phone and dialled an imaginary dial.

– Hello? - he said into the imaginary mouthpiece. - Is that Arthur Dent? Ah, hello, yes. This is Arthur Dent speaking. Don’t hang up.

He looked at the imaginary mouthpiece in disappointment.

– He hung up, - he said, shrugged, and put the imaginary phone neatly back on its imaginary hook.

– This is not my first temporal anomaly, - he added.

A glummer look replaced the already glum look on Arthur Dent’s face.

– So we’re not home and dry, - he said.

– We could not even be said, - replied Ford, - to be home and vigorously towelling ourselves off.

The game continued. The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot, and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball. The batsman swung and thwacked it behind him over the sight-screens. Ford’s eyes followed the trajectory of the ball and jogged momentarily. He stiffened. He looked along the flight path of the ball again and his eyes twitched again.

– This isn’t my towel, - said Arthur, who was rummaging in his rabbit-skin bag.

– Shhh, - said Ford. He screwed his eyes up in concentration.

– I had a Golgafrinchan jogging towel, - continued Arthur, - it was blue with yellow stars on it. This isn’t it.

– Shhh, - said Ford again. He covered one eye and looked with the other.

– This one’s pink, - said Arthur, - it isn’t yours is it?

– I would like you to shut up about your towel, - said Ford.

– It isn’t my towel, - insisted Arthur, - that is the point I am trying to…

– And the time at which I would like you to shut up about it, continued Ford in a low growl, - is now.

– All right, - said Arthur, starting to stuff it back into the primitively stitched rabbit-skin bag. - I realize that it is probably not important in the cosmic scale of things, it’s just odd, that’s all. A pink towel suddenly, instead of a blue one with yellow stars.

Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way which was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved. What he was doing was this. Regardless of the bemused stares it was provoking from his fellow members of the crowd gathered round the pitch, he was waving his hands in sharp movements across his face, ducking down behind some people, leaping up behind others, then standing still and blinking a lot. After a moment or two of this he started to stalk forward slowly and stealthily wearing a puzzled frown of concentration, like a leopard that’s not sure whether it’s just seen a half-empty tin of cat food half a mile away across a hot and dusty plain.

– This isn’t my bag either, - said Arthur suddenly.

Ford’s spell of concentration was broken. He turned angrily on Arthur.

– I wasn’t talking about my towel, - said Arthur. - We’ve established that that isn’t mine. It’s just that the bag into which I was putting the towel which is not mine is also not mine, though it is extraordinarily similar. Now personally I think that that is extremely odd, especially as the bag was one I made myself on prehistoric Earth. These are also not my stones, - he added, pulling a few flat grey stones out of the bag. - I was making a collection of interesting stones and these are clearly very dull ones.

A roar of excitement thrilled through the crowd and obliterated whatever it was that Ford said in reply to this piece of information. The cricket ball which had excited this reaction fell out of the sky and dropped neatly into Arthur’s mysterious rabbit-skin bag.

– Now I would say that that was also a very curious event, - said Arthur, rapidly closing the bag and pretending to look for the ball on the ground.

– I don’t think it’s here, - he said to the small boys who immediately clustered round him to join in the search, - it probably rolled off somewhere. Over there I expect. - He pointed vaguely in the direction in which he wished they would push off. One of the boys looked at him quizzically.

– You all right? - said the boy.

– No, - said Arthur.

– Then why you got a bone in your beard? - said the boy.

– I’m training it to like being wherever it’s put. - Arthur prided himself on saying this. It was, he thought, exactly the sort of thing which would entertain and stimulate young minds.

– Oh, - said the small boy, putting his head to one side and thinking about it. - What’s your name?

– Dent, - said Arthur, - Arthur Dent.

– You’re a jerk, Dent, - said the boy, - a complete asshole. - The boy looked past him at something else, to show that he wasn’t in any particular hurry to run away, and then wandered off scratching his nose. Suddenly Arthur remembered that the Earth was going to be demolished again in two days’ time, and just this once didn’t feel too bad about it.

Play resumed with a new ball, the sun continued to shine and Ford continued to jump up and down shaking his head and blinking.

– Something’s on your mind, isn’t it? - said Arthur.

– I think, - said Ford in a tone of voice which Arthur by now recognized as one which presaged something utterly unintelligible, - that there’s an SEP over there.

He pointed. Curiously enough, the direction he pointed in was not the one in which he was looking. Arthur looked in the one direction, which was towards the sight-screens, and in the other which was at the field of play. He nodded, he shrugged. He shrugged again.

– A what? - he said.

– An SEP.

– An S?…

– …EP.

– And what’s that?

– Somebody Else’s Problem.

– Ah, good, - said Arthur and relaxed. He had no idea what all that was about, but at least it seemed to be over. It wasn’t.

– Over there, - said Ford, again pointing at the sight-screens and looking at the pitch.

– Where? - said Arthur.

– There! - said Ford.

– I see, - said Arthur, who didn’t.

– You do? - said Ford.

– What? - said Arthur.

– Can you see, - said Ford patiently, - the SEP?

– I thought you said that was somebody else’s problem.

– That’s right.

Arthur nodded slowly, carefully and with an air of immense stupidity.

– And I want to know, - said Ford, - if you can see it.

– You do?

– Yes.

– What, - said Arthur, - does it look like?

– Well, how should I know, you fool? - shouted Ford. - If you can see it, you tell me.

Arthur experienced that dull throbbing sensation just behind the temples which was a hallmark of so many of his conversations with Ford. His brain lurked like a frightened puppy in its kennel. Ford took him by the arm.

– An SEP, - he said, - is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.