"Adams, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

He lowered his voice to a whisper.
"I have detected," he said, "disturbances in the wash."
He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the
wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy
fooling around with some leaves a little way off.
Arthur asked him to repeat what he had just said because he hadn't quite
taken his meaning. Ford repeated it.
"The wash?" said Arthur.
"The space-time wash," said Ford, and as the wind blew briefly past at
that moment, he bared his teeth into it.
Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.
"Are we talking about," he asked cautiously, "some sort of Vogon
laundromat, or what are we talking about?"
"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."
"Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?" He pushed his hands into the pocket
of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.
"What?" said Ford.
"Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly?"
Ford looked angrily at him.
"Will you listen?" he snapped.
"I have been listening," said Arthur, "but I'm not sure it's helped."
Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as
slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from a telephone
company accounts department.
"There seem ..." he said, "to be some pools ..." he said, "of instability
..." he said, "in the fabric ..." he said ...
Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing gown where Ford was
holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a
foolish remark.
"... in the fabric of space-time," he said.
"Ah, that," said Arthur.
"Yes, that," confirmed Ford.
They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and stared each
other resolutely in the face.
"And it's done what?" said Arthur.
"It," said Ford, "has developed pools of instability."
"Has it?" said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment.
"It has," said Ford with a similar degree of ocular immobility.
"Good," said Arthur.
"See?" said Ford.
"No," said Arthur.
There was a quiet pause.
"The difficulty with this conversation," said Arthur after a sort of
pondering look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer
negotiating a tricky outcrop, "is that it's very different from most of the
ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.
They weren't like this. Except perhaps some of the ones I've had with elms
which sometimes get a bit bogged down."
"Arthur," said Ford.
"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.