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

"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very
simple."
"Ah, well I'm not sure I believe that."
They sat down and composed their thoughts.
Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises
and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.
"Flat battery?" said Arthur.
"No," said Ford, "there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space+
time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it's somewhere in our vicinity."
"Where?"
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